My first photographic jolt occurred at the end of high school.

My boarding school roommate brought home a book by legendary Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh called Portraits of Greatness. Even if you don’t recognize his name, chances are that you’ve seen his famous portraits of Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Audrey Hepburn, Carl Yung, Georgia O’Keeffe, Dwight Eisenhower, Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway and so many others. Almost anybody who was anyone during Karsh’s working years (he died in 2002) was photographed by Karsh. See http://www.karsh.org for his official website.

Back to my eighteen year-old self. After class I found a book sitting on a counter in our room. With time to kill, I started flipping through page after page of masterful black and white portraiture. That was the first time that I was moved by photography. For the first time I realized that the combination of ink and paper in two-dimensional book form transcended those simple elements. The sum of those elements amounted to something beyond three dimensions. Present in those pages were emotion and humanity and spirit and personality and beauty and timelessness.

That was a watershed moment for me.

Fast forward many years and I’ve recently found myself focused on the art of headshot photography and particularly intrigued by what I call emotionless portraits. For these portraits I ask subjects to give me as blank, void and emotionless of expressions as possible.

Why?

I want to reduce if not eliminate the clutter of expression that often becomes automatic when we’re in front of a camera. My goal is to capture a sense of purity in the structure and details and geometry and personality that remains.

May your life be full of emotion but your portraits be emotionless.