JON NAIMAN

Jon Naiman was the photographer that inspired me for my own portrait project, mostly because of his Familiar Territory project where he when across Switzerland taking portraits of average, normal people and their pets in their own homes. I designed my project to have the same busy, yet natural space of a normal college student and created a series of what every college student does in their safe space, the space they are most comfortable in, their home away from home, and have them in poses that relates to what we do most. Whether that be procrastinating, relaxing and letting out steam, and sleeping or just overthinking, we all do it especially when we have a rough week filled of homework and exams.



All of Naiman’s photos in Familiar Territory have almost the same lighting that just floods the portraits, I tried to go in the opposite of this to create a more calming atmosphere with only the one lamp on the right side of the photo as my light source. All of his portraits are also filled with many colors, both bright and dull, within his environments. That specifically attracted me since you usually don’t see that in many photographs, usually you see photographer trying their best to create environments that have colors compliment each other as much as possible while Naiman just photographed his subjects in their own home, no matter what colors are involved in the room.



Naiman’s narrative is quite simple, especially when you know what he’s doing, he just documenting the average, common people of Switzerland, and I wanted to create the same simple narrative because sometimes a series or project doesn’t have to have such a deep meaning, and sometimes when you try to put such a deep meaning to your work some people see right over it and see whatever they want themselves, but that’s okay since art is subjective and it can carry many different meaning or have a different one for each person who looks at it. Although it is nice to see a work that is simple, so you don’t have to think too hard over it and just enjoy it without having to walk away wondering if you understood the whole thing correctly or not.



Every portrait in Familiar Territory has the person looking straight at the camera (with the exception of 5 people who are babies or looking at newspapers), I wasn’t really a fan of that idea. I think it takes away from the pet being the many focus of the project and the people all have such blank looks on their faces, there’s no emotion. The more I look the people and their faces, I actually start to get creeped out by them, so for my project I had my model/subject look away from the camera and focus on something in the room to try and avoid that creepy, empty stare while still getting the point of the series across. Naiman’s main focus of his work was of the pets anyway and most of them are looking away, so you could say I did the same.



Overall, Naiman is a fantastic photographer that expresses such a difference type of work through his busy, yet still simple backgrounds and narratives that helped inspire my series of the average college student. Even though we had some differences, he was still the main inspiration for me.