When I first started taking color pictures, it didn't ever occur to me
as an option not to underexpose them. In fact, my earliest images
are among the very darkest of my work. Some of it is too dark to
see the figures lurking underneath all of that blackness. Even my
lighter work is more saturated then it could be (or perhaps should
be); if the people in the portraits didn't appear to be downing in the
dark, it just didn't seem like a finished image.
Photography's principal of reversal is not a new one, but it still
seems more intriguing to me over time. The more light I pour
through the camera or the enlarger, the darker my negative or
print; similarly, I add yellow, cyan, and magenta during printing
in order to remove these same hues from my negative.
So the paradox in portraiture in not that dissimilar. By drowning
out my subjects in the rounded-out darkness, their viewer must
seek and behold the subject, enhanced and denied, lurking beneath
all of that heavy cyan, yellow, and magenta.
