Nicholas Nixon’s portraits give a sense of reality, he achieves this by making
himself almost invisible, the prominence is always in his subjects, and still Nixon’s
presence in his portraits is subtle and yet so evident. Realism in portraiture is
difficult to achieve, the genre of portraiture is mostly staged, and that approach
tends to take away spontaneity and veracity, sometimes making people look stiff
and uninteresting. Studying Nixon´s images and identifying some of the techniques
he puts in motion will let us make an approximation to his photographic style, and
learning some tools that we can add to our own image making.