Warts, stubble and all ...
By ASHLEY CAMPBELL Soft focus and smiling faces. Shining eyes and muted backgrounds. These are the ingredients of portrait photography — aren’t they? Not according to the Wellington photographer Kevin Capon. His portraits show wrinkles and halfday stubble. Eyes sometimes bulge, and noses appear larger than life. Capon’s portraits are currently showing at the CS.A. Gallery. They are all of reasonably wellknown New Zealanders —- as never seen before. The exhibition is a result of a team effort Capon took the photographs and his wife, Carol Te Teira, selected the shots to be exhibited. The result is a collection of portraits of people who are, according to Capon, doing interesting and positive things with their lives.
The portraits are contact printed on archival paper — the original negatives are the same
size as the print In the developing process, there, fore, there has been no loss of detail.
Capon says there is no statement behind the portraits. The exhibition is important to him and Te Teira simply because it has allowed them to use a certain photographic process, and explore faces in a way they had not explored them before. Capon admits that some people will find the portraits “awful,” and may possibly be offended by them.
“But to us they have an appeal of being romantic, rather than frightening,” he says.
“We were investigating the face as a landscape. It became like a mask, where the information really comes through the eyes, and the way the mouth Is formed.”
The exhibition is being held in conjunction with that of another photographer, Paul Caponigro. It will run until March 8.
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Press, 25 February 1987, Page 20
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271Warts, stubble and all ... Press, 25 February 1987, Page 20
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