Kat Hennessy Weekly Post [Week 4]

Mark Tucker

Mark Tucker has been a known photographer for over 20 years. He originally started with film cameras (Hasselblad 203 and Fuji 680), but eventually switched to a Pentax 645D digital camera. He has also learned the wet-plate collodion process, and now he uses this process, even mixing his own chemicals. When viewing his website, it is clear that he has a love for black and white photographs and many of his portraits are such. However, he also has wonderful color portraits that range from vibrant coloration to almost "vintage" looking, less bold colored photos. Many of his portraits are very close to his subjects with a shallow depth of field causing the viewer to see them with great clarity and not a lot of additional information around them. However, he also has several portraits with his subjects interacting with their environment, and while the subject is in focus, there is additional environmental information in focus to capture that interaction.

Tucker photographs a wide range of people from every race, gender, social class, and so on. By either capturing his subjects in a close, intimate view or a more panned out view of them in their environment, he gives us a deep sense of who these people really are. Many of them are not smiling- in fact their facial expressions often seem very natural, indicating that he spends as much time as he reasonably can (for randomly finding a lot of his subjects out and about in the world) getting to know them and making them feel comfortable with him. He does not try to force a pose or an expression, and this allows for a very emotionally impacting picture.