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Matinee: Tracy Page on Fine Art Photography
14 March 2020
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 335th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Tracy Page on Fine Art Photography.
In this 3:40 promotional video for Zeiss, portrait photographer Tracy Bosworth Page reveals how she turned a disability into an asset for portrait photography.
She has never had the ability to remember a face. Prosopagnosia may not seem like an asset for a portrait photographer but Page has turned it into one.
She has never had the ability to remember a face.
It's been as important to her as her fine art training in developing her personal portraiture style, she says.
In fact, she studied fine art at the University of Georgia in the hopes of becoming a portrait artist. But she quickly realized her inability to remember a face would make that impossible.
She picked up a camera instead. And she found herself compensating for her prosopagnosia by cropping very close. Those images caught the attention of an agent looking for someone to do head shots that were cropped close. And that's how her career took off.
Her head shots for actors capitalized on her knowledge of color theory by emphasizing eye color. But her breakthrough into fine art photography came when a friend dropped by to sit for a portrait that she shot in black-and-white.
It was a revelation that led her right back to the portrait art she had abandoned 20 years ago.
"My camera has supplanted what my memory can't do," she says. "It's really made me thankful for what I don't see because it's created what I do see."