I'm about to get myself in hot water. These days you're not supposed to make gender-specific pronouncements. It's not politically correct. By my experience has been that men and women tend to react differently to having their pictures taken.
As Atlanta, Georgia, photographer Kevin Ames says, "When I used to ask a potential client [if they wanted a makeup artist], women would answer 'No, thanks. I can do my own.' Men would give a look that said having makeup applied was an idea from a far distant planet." I'm male myself, and I have never had makeup on my face, not even when I played Gandalf in a school play in seventh grade, my one and only experience as a thespian. I have a friend (retired now) who was a TV weatherman and news anchor, and he went to makeup every night.
In fact, I could make lots of gender-specific pronouncements about photographing people, marking myself as an outdated troglodyte of an extraneous generation. For instance, with a male executive portrait or graduation portrait, you might have ten or fifteen minutes before your subject starts to look bored, whereas women tend to be comfortable being admired, and being photographed comes under the heading of being admired as long as that person doesn't feel insecure or anxious about her appearance. I encountered women and girls who seemed to have an infinite interest in being photographed, like that bear that was in the news a few weekends ago. (Now I'm making ursine-specific pronouncements. I'm bad.) I'm talking about normal citizens. Professional models—the highest level I ever experienced was one who charged $10k a day in the '80s, when the supermodels were making $25k a day—were amazing in their ability to turn it on and off.
I might point out that advertising for models is exempted from EEOC laws because discriminating by type is "job-related or necessary to the operation of the business." Saying you want to hire specific types of people isn't discriminatory. Maybe blog posts that are job-related could be exempted from being considered politically incorrect as well?
Anyway, here's what I wanted to say: I had a tendency to want to photograph people as they are. Men were typically okay with that because they didn't care (that was the sense I got, anyway). Women not so much. It's true, I am generalizing here, and people can be very different. But as a general rule, women tend to like to look good, and they don't mind if you take time and effort to make them look better.
But I got into trouble with this a lot. I used to ask high-school girls to come to their session with a hair brush and several different tops, and every now and then I'd have them re-do their hair—just so their hair wouldn't be exactly the same in every frame, just in case there was something about it they didn't like. One girl refused, saying she liked her hair being messy. Except she didn't—she hated her hair in all nine rolls I shot of her, and never bought a print. (That was before Photoshop when even small changes were difficult to make.) Another time, a man in a shirt and tie in a family portrait refused to pay for an expensive and time-consuming portrait session because the tab of his belt was outside of his belt loop instead of tucked underneath it. He ended up paying half. I lost $300, about $800 in today's dollars, for not hiring a stylist for the session. Although I've always wondered whether even a professional stylist would have caught the belt loop thing.
Atlanta photographer Kevin Ames solved this problem by making makeup artists mandatory in his portrait sessions. He was dissatisfied using Photoshop retouching only, so he uses both a hair and makeup stylist and Photoshop retouching. I didn't contact him to ask if I could use his illustration, but see his undated blog post "Makeup Artist Required!" and take a look at the three-frame comparison of Cheryl. I would be fine with the version on the left, "Clean face & hair." But most women, I believe, would be happier with the version on the other end, labeled "Retouched" (meaning hair and makeup done, and also retouched). (It's interesting how identical Cheryl's smile is in all three shots.)
It's been a long time since I did a portrait professionally—the last one was five years ago, and I probably went five years before that without doing one. I miss it. To be honest, though, I very seldomly sprung for stylists because I was working at a lower level than that. I wonder how much hair and makeup stylists cost to hire now?
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Paul Judice: "I've worked in fashion and beauty retouching for about 30 years and have always been conflicted by the way we create an unrealistic bar for physical beauty. Perhaps out of guilt, I went to career day at my daughter's school when she was in grade two or three. I showed before and after shots of a very famous supermodel (something that could have gotten me in very deep trouble) and let the kids look for the differences. Once all the changes were found and we discussed the process of creating false perfection, I asked the girls what they had learned from my presentation. The unanimous answer was, 'We want to look good!'"
Geoff Wittig: "In my limited experience, it's really not so much a gender-specific thing as personality-specific. That is, there are certainly women who are particular about their appearance in photographs, but plenty who aren't so concerned. And there are plenty of guys who are in their own way extremely particular about how they look. Plenty of business types really want to project dominance, to radiate being the alpha male. In my neck of the woods, it's most often a desire to project a bit of swagger and sneer. Call it the flannel 'n' mustache aesthetic.
"I get a skewed view of the issue, though. My lovely wife of 42 years photographs wonderfully...except that I have taken perhaps a half dozen good photographs of her in that time. In almost all the others she got her hands in the way or turned her back before I could trip the shutter. She's so attuned to the threat, she can hear the nearly silent focusing sound from my portrait lens and gets her hands in the way before things are sharp. Sigh."
Mike replies: I love that "so attuned to the threat." ROFL!
Seriously, though, you two might be good candidates for my "three-minute portrait" contract. See my New Yorker article under "Difficult Subjects."
Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "I always thought a portrait was a success if the subject either saw something authentic about themselves that he or she hadn't seen before, or if they felt it showed them as they thought of themselves, or the best selves. The problem is that none of us sees ourselves the way others see us. My own theory about this, at the most basic physical level, this is because we only tend to see reflections of ourselves, which are left-right reversed, whereas the rest of the world sees us as the eye sees us (right side on the right side). The other stumbling blocks are psychological. I, for instance, think of myself as a 190 lb. 24 year old, when in fact I am a 280 lb. 50-something. Photographic images of me insist on portraying the photons bouncing off the more well-padded current version of me, rather than the svelte version my mind is convinced I present to the world. Photoshop ain't going to do it, if you know what I mean."
Kirk: "I'm not ready to comment much on the basic premise of this blog; that women care more than men about looking good. But I can speak objectively about the costs here in Austin [Texas] of paying for make-up and hair professionals on a photo shoot.
"To keep to current times:
"In the first week of November 2022 I produced a job and photographed for a large medical/technology company which has an international reach. We spent several days on location at the client's Austin offices which included two complete operating suites. They use these to train doctors on cardiac procedures using their products.
"For the shoot we required two male and two female models which we got from a regional talent agency. The cost of the models for one day was $4,500 each. Or $18,000 for all four. Each talent or model was at the location for one day only. The fee included specific, limited usage rights. We hired a skilled make-up person and there was enough time in the schedule for her to also touch up hair. Her fee for each eight hour day was $1,250. She took an equal amount of time preparing the male and female models. I judged her fee to be in the middle-to-higher end of make-up artist's fees in Austin in 2022. You'll probably pay more for the same skills in film and video production....
"I should also mention that I did have one assistant on set. A professional who had worked for several years in NYC and who will probably transition to a full time photographer in 2023. His fee was $500 for an eight hour day.
"I recently (January) photographed both male and female attorneys for a different project. More of a conventional portrait shoot. Shot in their offices as environmental portraits. All came in business attire which meant suits and ties for the men and gender appropriate, corresponding attire for the women. All were impeccably dressed. None required any additional make up. The person most concerned with sartorial appearances was a male who was focused on the fact that his white shirt had 'wrinkles.' I think of a wrinkle as a creased bit of fabric but he was referencing the natural tendency of shirts to have undulating fabric instead of presenting as a fixed, single plane. I assured him that this would be easily fixed in Photoshop. He was relaxed after that conversation.
"I never, ever think of my subjects as 'being admired.' Which I interpret to mean 'judged by their physical beauty.' In my mind, after having done well over 10,000 paid portraits in my careers, my goal is to build a rapport with a sitter. To establish a give-and-take based on equal power. I consider a portrait successful when the sitter and I become comfortable enough with each other to move from 'posing' to the sitter feeling comfortable presenting themself authentically. It takes more time and effort to actually connect, but to my mind it's much more in line with what my clients want.
"Except that unlike your example of the sitter and client being one and the same, in my business the client is the corporate entity, publication or advertising agency that hires me. My hope, always, is that they hire me for both my style and my ability to look past physical appearance enough to establish a human rapport and relationship.
"I should also add that given our busy market, most make-up artists and stylists charge by the day, not by the hour. That means that successful studios that depend directly on individual customers as portrait clients can only cost-effectively use make-up people who are in-house, or the studios must be able to efficiently schedule a full day of portrait shoots to spread the costs across. It's different in advertising, as we can budget for a make-up professional to come in, hang out on set, and spend the day working in a few concentrated spurts. Clients are paying for these services as a line item in a much bigger overall budget.
"Family and friends? They're tough. They don't like to pay. I can't justify hiring a stylist when photographing casual images of B and B. (emoji implied)." [B and B are Kirk's wife and son. —Ed.]