Image credit: Meg Hewitt
Just one day to go until our fantastic free workshop on portrait photography with three amazing photographers. Each has a distinctive style so we decided to ask each for one piece of advice on how to go about making a great portrait.
This time we spoke to Meg Hewitt
Image credit: Meg Hewitt
Meg Hewitt formally studied sculpture, painting and temporal media before shifting to photography in 2010. Since then, she has been a finalist in the Moran Prize for Contemporary Photography, the Head On Photo Awards, the Lensculture Street Photography Awards and the Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women. She has been awarded medals from the Tokyo International Foto Competition 2018 and the Prix de la Photographie, Paris, 2016. Meg is a member of the Australian photo collective Oculi and international street photography collective UP.
Meg is a prolific photographer whose punchy black and white style is readily recognisable. Whilst her approach to portraiture is more fluid, she stresses the need to carefully think about the background and the context in which the person appears.
Image credit: Meg Hewitt
Whilst Meg’s approach isn’t pre-planned – she falls more into the street photography genre – she still sees the act of making a portrait to be more of a collaborative creation rather than an imposed one. She seeks to get agreement from her subject and tries to stay with them as long as she can. Meg reckons that talking with the subject can open up how they feel and think about things in the image
Meg says:
“I don’t want people to feel like I am ‘taking’ a picture of them which is why I like the word make. I am not stealing their likeness and walking away, it’s a collaboration.”
We hope you got a lot out of this advice from all of our workshop facilitators. Make sure you sign up for Friday’s free portrait workshop to hear more from these amazing photographers here.
And don’t forget to enter this year’s Head On Photo Awards – only two weeks left to enter.
Image credit: Meg Hewitt
