Photogenic Portrait Management

Year: 1966
Place: London & New York
Publisher: The Focal Press
Edition: 1st
Language: EN
Pages: 176
Condition: VG
Cover condition: G
Binding: HC with DJ
Illustrated: b/w
Ft: 22,3x14,8 cm. 355 gr.

- PHOTOGENIC PORTRAIT MANAGEMENT condenses a lifetime of individual experience of one photographer. It is a book for the man behind the camera as much as the sitter facing the lens for both are concerned with the millions of personal portraits that reach the public through the press, cinema and television.
The "brand image" is a widely used concept of modern publicity. Yet long before public relations became a pseudo science man began to manipulate his personal image. And the obvious means has been his visual likeness the portrait.
Liselotte Strelow, one of Europe's leading portrait photographers, has spent well over thirty years studying the psychology of the personal likeness and its effect on the public through the visual media of communication.
Nowadays fewer people than ever have a say in how and when their likeness is presented to vast masses of sensation addicted and news hungry readers, viewers and audiences. The best they can do is to try to control their likeness whenever it is recorded. In this book Miss Strelow concentrates on the controversial problems of conveying and modifying the personal image. She deals with the efforts that both photographer and subject can make to render this image favourable or to adapt it to specific purposes. She equally points out the pitfalls that men and women face when they unexpectedly find themselves in front of the camera the power of the press and other media, and the public reaction to them. She covers the means of managing appearances as well as the scope of technical stage direction in fact all aspects of the art of being and becoming photogenic and of governing individual impact and impression.
This volume ranges from basic principles to sophisticated gimmickry and illustrates its points by a collection of mainly the author's photographs. These are a representative cross-section of what the present-day public sees as pictures of people in publications and on their screens. They demonstrate how and why personal pictures succeed and where they fail to make their point.

LISELOTTE STRELOW was born in 1908 and started her professional photographic training in 1930. For nearly six years she worked as a photographer for Kodak in Berlin, then opened her own studio there in 1938. In 1950 she moved to Düsseldorf on the Rhine, and soon became one of the elite of internationally known photographers. Although she has since given up her studio in favour of free-lance feature photography, portraiture has remained her special field. She contributes regularly to leading German newspapers and periodicals, as well as to the more important photographic journals and yearbooks in the U.S.A., Japan and elsewhere. She took part in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Brussels World Fair, and gained a number of awards, among them at the Lucerne World Exhibition of Photography in 1952, and gold medal at the Photo-Biennale in Venice in 1957. She was the first woman photographer to be awarded the "Photokina Eye" in 1958.