[6-14] "Hand"

Some of the great portraits of actors and writers involve a hand: in the hair, under the jaw, maybe further on a table or a window ledge.

Hands play a role, and maybe we don't view images as having gesticulation, but my experience dictates otherwise.

It is hard to be photogenic at all times; politicians deal with flubs of the lips and eyes caught by photographers. Personal images should be controlled. The cover of Hillary Clinton's 2003 autobiography is a good example.

What I feel the image reveals is an apparent effortlessness. The right hand clasps but does not form an obvious fist; it feels dubiously placed over a black turtlehead and over the chin. Nobody really notices, though; the reader sees Hillary Clinton and wonders, as we always do when we have not seen a familiar face in decades, not if but how they aged, whether the eyes retain the charisma we knew, and so we draw from all the facets of expression a sentiment of mood conveyed in purely physical ways. And so the photographer's job is to package it and avoid drama of how. This is the real job: to make it completely accidental.

We can focus on some details (how strong is the outline around the iris? how large are the pupils? where does the nose shadow fall, and how deep are the shadows? where is the hand placed? what is the hair saying?) and yet the final effort remains that none of this was ever really considered, or else it we question it is real or fake.