Reconceptualizing the Portrait

Last fall, I took an intermediate photography course here at Pomona. For the final project in the class, I decided to apply a technique I’d been developing in the class to create some sort of dialogue about the nature of portraiture. To do so, I took traditional portraits of eight friends taken in the dorm rooms and placed them next to circular panoramas of those rooms set on a background of a texture or object from the room.

In the same way that a portrait should tell you about a person, I think that my panoramas do as well, but in a very different manner. By placing the eight pairs next to each other, I sought to find an aesthetically pleasing way to combine the two and create a more complete “portrait” of my subjects. Here are some individual collages that I recently made for my Intermediate/Advanced Photoshop class:

Jose: Dorm Room Circular Panorama & Portrait