P13: Hands

Portraiture and portraits of hands.  Seems an odd subject for Social Documentary and in particular in the context of this course.  I understand the value of detail shots and the fact that hands can be highly expressive,  but what is to be learned from photographing hands without the context of a broader study.  I could simply have knocked on a few doors and asked my neighbours and friends to submit for a rather strange studio session, but that again would be kind of pointless.  This would be a treatment of hands as a still life, sculptures of human experience.  Technically interesting, but essentially no different to photographing a series of flowers.  

What interests me about hands is what they do and what they express.  At rest they say something about age and perhaps profession, but moving they become a gesture and begin to tell a story about that person.  When I worked on my self portrait for assignment 1 I spent quite some time thinking about how to photograph my hands

In each case I looked at what I was doing, my hands have no interest in a portrait other than as signifiers of myself, in this case showing that whilst I am a camera nut I also do the washing up.  Mundane, of course, but a part of the story of me.

With this in mind I went out into the city looking to creating some portraits that just show hands.  As with much of my recent photography I wanted to be candid and discrete which meant a small camera system that would not attract notice.  In this case I have used my Samsung NX20 with it's APS-C sensor and an 85mm lens, so equating to around 130mm in real money.  I knew that this would not get me very close, but that was OK, I wanted these portraits to be environmental, to make the hands a part of the world.  I could equally have grabbed my Canon 7D and 100-400mm lens providing a 640mm equivalent focal length.  I would have stood out like a sore thumb and the shots would be literally just hands.

Each of these photographs features hands doing something, holding food, cigarettes, or books. Each says something about the city I live in, the outdoor cafe society, the tourists looking in a guidebook and the poor living out of plastic shopping bags. In each I have as requested excluded the persons face.  This brings focus to the hands, however, I do not necessarily think that including the face distracts from the hands.  In the following two images, the hands are still very much the purpose of the images, they define the dynamic and the subject.

I find these to be more effective as documents, they say something about the larger world.  In particular the woman, head down reading her phone as she walks, a posture I see over and over again as I look around me.  In this case the bag she carries, with the logo of Munich's most popular book shop contrasts with the digital instrument she is carrying.

Again, I find myself critical of the project structure of this course, this is not a bad thing to do and I have tried to make it into something more, but it is somewhat formulaic.  Perhaps I am overly critical, my enthusiasm is lagging at present.