Portrait Series

Steve Jobs, circa 2006 by Albert Watson

GAME FACES
by Jennifer Kay

Assignment: Find portraits along the sidelines of a high school football game.

Last week, Apple honored Steve Jobs by posting Albert Watson’s 2006 portrait of Jobs on its webpage. The innovator wasn’t remembered with pictures of his products, or a spreadsheet of his company’s financial success or a timeline of his years with the company. Jobs was remembered instead with a simple portrait shot on film.

The black and white image does what portraiture is supposed to do -- it transcends merely showing Jobs’ physical characteristics by revealing something important about Jobs. The simplicity of the composition reflects Jobs’ insistence on the cleanest, most elegant design for his products and for his consumers’ experience with those products. The portrait reveals Jobs’ role as the driving force behind Apple’s designs.

The challenge I faced in shooting portraits at a high school football game last week was how to show the roles the players, cheerleaders and band members were performing that night. These kids have other aspects of their personalities, other interests, but when they put those uniforms on for the Southwest-Braddock game, they took on specific roles.





Instead of watching the action on the field, I looked for quieter moments on the sidelines. I looked for the players sitting on the bench, not resting but tense and emotionally still on the field as the score flip-flopped. I found cheerleaders giggling and mugging for the camera, no matter what the scoreboard said. I watched a saxophonist line up for the half-time show with, inexplicably, two instruments in his hands.

I tried to shoot a portrait of a high school football game, not just portraits of the students on the sidelines. If we pulled these students off the field and into a studio for formal portraits, would those images still reveal something truthful about them?