Nothing in the book itself regarding the author. I found the following at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where Angier appears to teach.
Roswell Angier (photography, Studio at Tufts) was educated at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. Angier has worked for commercial magazines and on numerous documentary projects. Books include A Kind of Life: Conversations in the Combat Zone (Addison House, NH, 1976), and Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography (AVA Books, 2007). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA. Angier's exhibitions include solo shows at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, and Gitterman Gallery, New York. Current interests are landscape and narrative. He is currently working on Revere Beach Boulevard, a project about the sea wall.
Angier is currently represented by the Gitterman Gallery in New York City. A substantial amount of his work can be seen on the gallery's web site, www.gittermangallery.com.
The subtitle, A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography, suggests this is more than an academic text intended to expound on the meaning of portraiture. It is in fact punctuated with shooting assignments, making it something of a self-contained course in 12 chapters:
How to get the most out of this book.
- Introduction.
- About looking.
- Self-portrait/no face.
- People at the margin: The edge of the frame.
- Behavior in the moment: Picturing eventfulness.
- You spy: Voyeurism and surveillance.
- Portrait, mirror, masquerade.
- Confrontation: Looking through the bull's eye.
- Out of focus: The disappearing subject.
- Darkness.
- Flash!.
- Figures in a landscape: Tableaux.
The introduction begins with an interesting juxtaposition:
Both spoken by someone holding a camera, but suggestive of differing relationships and attitudes. The first, Angier says, is typically spoken to a stranger, the second to someone known. The second speaks of a more serious purpose and may negatively affect the behavior of the subject by discouraging playfulness or experimentation.
- May I take your picture?
- I would like to take a portrait of you.
A portrait, Angier tells us, is the product of a consensual process, a recording of an interpersonal exchange. It embodies “the presence photographer’s thoughtful regard.” [p1]
Chapter One details Avedon’s silent approach. Angier himself notes that this process is rumored, but regardless of how true it might be, it provides a thoughtful take on making photos of people, of capturing not only a subject’s reaction to silence, but as well the subject’s interaction with a silent photographer. The suggested activity in this chapter is to do just this, to sit with someone for an hour with a camera pointed at him or her, an interesting experiment if a willing subject could be found. Who would I like to sit with silently for an hour.
Angier continues with an analysis of two images of women, shot by female photographers more than a century apart. He writes to excess to raise the following questions (quoted in list form):
- What, or who, am I, the photographer, looking at?
- From where am I looking?
- How does this position define me?
- How does my gaze intersect with - or fail to intersect with - the gaze of my human subject?
These questions, he he says, precede all others. [p9]
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