Sepia Saturday #301: Profiles in Sepia

What a change from SS #300 - the death photo. This week's choice couldn't be in more direct contrast. The younger angelic looking children look like a pair of twins with a sister about 9 months older. Rapt, they are looking at something out of the frame - something entrancing. What struck me were the lovely profile shots, which in this age of selfies, we see rarely. In profile, we can appreciate the graceful curves of the tiny shining faces; the upturned noses and sweet little chins. There is also an unselfconsciousness to the profile shot - camera stiffness and posing anxieties seem to melt away.

You can't help noticing the profiles are all of the children's left sides. This is the preferred side for portraiture; artists routinely posed people this way throughout the history of painting. If choice of pose were just a random thing, you'd expect to see thirty-three and a third percent of all paintings full face forward; thirty-three and a third percent, right facing and thrity-three and a third percent left facing. 

"But when scholars looked, that's not what they found. One study of 1,474 portraits painted in Europe from the 16th to the 20th centuries found that roughly 60 percent showed the sitter favoring the left side of the face — men 56 percent of the time, women 68 percent. Another study looked at 50,000 objects from the stone age to the present and found that after the early Greeks, there was a consistent left-profile bias. When it comes to Jesus suffering on the cross, the tilt is dramatic: Jesus' head is shown facing left more than 90 percent of the time."

You can read more about this bias here: http://www.npr.org

I surfed around Google Images looking for more profile shots and found a few classics:

Grace Kelley

Jean Harlowe

Ingrid Bergman

Lauren Bacall

Clara Bow

Marlene Dietrich

Looking for profile shots of youngsters, I found Shirley Temple in three-quarter profile, another popular pose.

Profiles seem to have come in and out of fashion in portrait styling. In the thirties they were popular for actresses. If the subject had a particularly distinctive profile, it was the signature pose as with Barbra Streisand and Alfred Hitchcock. 

This photo was stuck in my brain somehow as profiles of the women, but when I found it, I realized it's more the classic three-quarter shot. It was in an Annie Leibovitz book which I had on my coffee table for many years. 

Annie Leibowitz

As I was in the grips of Google, looking at famous women's profiles, I stumbled on this lovely set of photos, admittedly off the subject for this week, but I would guess of interest to Sepians. The young woman Christine H. McConnell, a stylist and photographer, found that looking at her family photos wasn't enough to satisfy her yearnings for a connection with her ancestry; she wanted to actually be in photos with her relatives and so she staged herself in matching poses to those in her family album and this is the result.  You can read more about the project at www.today.com. "A great-great-great tribute: Woman represents 7 generations in recreated family photos."

Side by side with great great grandmother

With great grandmother

Lovely idea and I'm this sure brought her much closer to these relatives - a great legacy too for the next generation.

With grandmother

With her mother

The final photo I have is a profile portrait of my sister Eilleen when she was a toddler. This is the only decent profile photo I could find in the family archives. I'd say she was 18 months or so; that sausage roll atop her head with the ringlet combination was a favorite hair-do for little ones. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the bed and almost expiring from frustration while my mother did my hair this way using a wet hair brush and her fingers to form the ringlets. 

My sister was a lucky child and looked good from both sides. The photographer however, must have decided that the right side was the right side for her. 

Follow the mesmerizing light over to Sepia Saturday for more ideas about the photo.