Corporate

Annual Report Portraits

Annual Report Portraits

An annual report portrait has to survive being printed at size, sitting next to eleven others, and being looked at by people deciding whether to trust the company. An ordinary headshot has to survive being three centimetres wide on a website. They are different objects and the difference shows.

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Why Every Leadership Page Looks the Same

Why Every Leadership Page Looks the Same

Open twenty corporate leadership pages and you will see the same photograph twenty times. Grey background or white. Even light, no shadow anywhere. A slight turn of the shoulders. An expression somewhere between welcome and apology. The subjects differ; the portraits do not.

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Photographing Ray Dalio

Photographing Ray Dalio

Some sitters arrive having decided in advance what a photograph is for. Ray Dalio is one of them.

He is a man who has spent decades being listened to carefully, and who has written at length about how thinking should be done. That produces a particular problem for a portraitist, and it is not the one people assume. The difficulty is not reticence. It is fluency. A person accustomed to explaining themselves clearly will keep explaining, and a face that is mid-explanation is a face performing a function rather than occupying itself.

What I wanted was the pause before the sentence.

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