Author: Sam Tata

Publisher: Erin, Ont. : Porcupine's Quill

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 9780889841314

`A portrait,' Sam has said, `is a passport to friendship', and many of his anecdotes concern his great company of friends, friends who tend to be writers, photographers, painters, musicians, architects, and actors. This volume contains the portraits of 50 of Sam's literary friends. Although these portraits are a record of people at a certain time and place, they are not merely an archive. These portraits are works of art in their own right. The background details are not merely descriptive. Sam is an artist and a considerable one. His pictures are carefully composed. He is, of course, concerned with capturing the `inner lines of force in the being of his subject' but he is equally concerned with the making of a picture, with composition, with shapes, with blackness and whiteness. In Sam's portraits, psychological and artistic concerns fuse. The images define both us and him and will live on to become a part of our national heritage. He has said of portraiture: `The sitter must be willing to be photographed. The photographer must be sensitive to the sitter. And a rapport between the two has to be established.' At the beginning of a photographic session, people are wary. Sam works at establishing the necessary rapport through conversation. He usually takes 24 or 36 exposures and his experience is that the better pictures start to arrive somewhere in the middle of the roll -- that is, when the sitter has moved from acquiescence to active participation in the session. Another way Sam helps the sitter relax is by using the natural light in the familiar surroundings of the subject's home; he sees the studio and the paraphernalia of tripods, flashes, and reflectors as inhibiting. Many of Sam's portraits, then, offer us the almost voyeuristic pleasure of observing domestic interiors for there are usually things in Sam's pictures -- ornaments, paintings, books, plants, pianos, sculpture, dogs, furniture. These furnishings and possessions further express and suggest the sitter's personality; Sam has actually called these photographs `environmental portraits'.