Jan Söhlke | Portrait Photographer

Playfully rephrasing Thomas Edison’s famous quote as ‘Portrait photography is 10% inspiration and 90% moving furniture’, Arnold Newman not only refers to the physical work of lifting things but acknowledges that all the less than glamorous work we do before we even get the camera out matters. It’s research work paired with psychological work that – often under time pressure – earns the trust and the permission we need. It’s also design work that makes the image and in those cases where plan and reality do not match, it means work to sit with that tension rather than trying to resolve it too quickly. And sometimes it’s the work you have to do on yourself to abandon your precious preconceived concept to pivot towards something entirely different presenting itself spontaneously, when it serves the narrative much better. In that sense, I read moving furniture as the negotiation between the possibilities you see and what the subject allows, between the plan and what the environment accommodates, and between the first idea and the one that actually works.

When all the work results in final alignment, it never ceases to amaze me how photography is able to unite and condense the many, sometimes contradictory facets of a personality in a single image through a carefully composed contextualisation – or: by moving furniture.