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Image credit: Meg Hewitt

Just one day to go until our fantastic free workshop on portrait photography with three amazing photographers.  Each has a distinctive style so we decided to ask each for one piece of advice on how to go about making a great portrait.

This time we spoke to Meg Hewitt 

 

Image credit: Meg Hewitt

Meg Hewitt formally studied sculpture, painting and temporal media before shifting to photography in 2010. Since then, she has been a finalist in the Moran Prize for Contemporary Photography, the Head On Photo Awards, the Lensculture Street Photography Awards and the Maggie Diaz Photography Prize for Women. She has been awarded medals from the Tokyo International Foto Competition 2018 and the Prix de la Photographie, Paris, 2016. Meg is a member of the Australian photo collective Oculi and international street photography collective UP.

Meg is a prolific photographer whose punchy black and white style is readily recognisable. Whilst her approach to portraiture is more fluid, she stresses the need to carefully think about the background and the context in which the person appears.

Image credit: Meg Hewitt

Whilst Meg’s approach isn’t pre-planned – she falls more into the street photography genre – she still sees the act of making a portrait to be more of a collaborative creation rather than an imposed one. She seeks to get agreement from her subject and tries to stay with them as long as she can.  Meg reckons that talking with the subject can open up how they feel and think about things in the image

Meg says:

“I don’t want people to feel like I am ‘taking’ a picture of them which is why I like the word make. I am not stealing their likeness and walking away, it’s a collaboration.”

 

We hope you got a lot out of this advice from all of our workshop facilitators. Make sure you sign up for Friday’s free portrait workshop to hear more from these amazing photographers here.

 

RSVP NOW

 

And don’t forget to enter this year’s Head On Photo Awards – only two weeks left to enter.

 

ENTER THE AWARDS

 

Image credit: Meg Hewitt

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Head On Foundation (est. 2008) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting photographers' work at all career stages. We encourage excellence and innovation, make photography accessible to all, and raise awareness of important issues through the medium. The Foundation's main activities are Head On Photo Festival and Head On Awards (Portrait, Landscape, and Student photographic prizes) and an annual program of collaborative projects. Head On Foundation is a bridge between Australian and international photography markets. The festival has toured in the US, China, India, Europe, and New Zealand, introducing the global arts community to the wealth of photographic talent Australia possesses.

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