Cesar Romero beat me to saying “The camera never lies. It lies everyday.”

At the photo studio, I’ve been watching and photographing some of whom would be considered  “beautiful” girls, who came in to have their portraits taken. The magic of photography is its ability to trap time and stun that unstoppable force in the essence of living. However, this very ability also tricks our perception into an anthropomorphic state, allowing us the luxury of liberally reading our prejudices, preferences, and a collective consciousness culled from years of myth-making into an open source face.

Like that physics problem where a ball gets thrown inside a dark room and a flash is fired, we see the ball in that split illuminated second, but nobody knows which direction it came from or where it is going.

If you looked at these beautiful girls in the moment the studio strobes flashed – in that silent instant made immortal – you would think you were looking at the very image of beatific vision: light skin, blonde angelic locks framing a youthful face of purity with blue translucent azure eyes shining in a dreamy pause between a poet’s longing stanzas adulating the grace of love, compassion, and profound humanity.

But that’s just the moment the flash went off.

Now if you were there to take in the moments leading up to that photographic frame, and the time afterward, you would hear and see a selfish, vicious, self-absorbed, inconsiderate and mean monster, yelling at her mother to go away so she could channel her inner Steven Meisel and get in her Vogue zone. The smile was turned on and off for the camera, as mechanically and with as much grace as a pneumatic jackhammer destroying a concrete sidewalk. Let us be very clear here: the only reason she tolerated the studio attendants, dressers, lighting technicians, and posers was because their only concern was to make her look good. This was “me time” for her, and we were all there to present her in the best light by making our time her time.

Storytelling in Western civilization may have devoted a little too much equity to the eyes. “Eyes are the window to one’s soul,” “I get lost in your eyes,” portrait photographers seem heavily invested on the eyes as well. One wonders if singers should be writing more songs about the throat.

You can tell something from one’s eyes, but certainly nowhere near the extent of being able to look into his or her soul. I recently had a conversation with a photographer about Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, regarded by many as perhaps THE greatest portrait photograph ever taken. McCurry is tremendously talented with a stunning portfolio, and this is a beautifully shot photograph, but every time I look at the picture, one part of me thinks about the initial maniacal response to this photo around the world. The moment people saw those eyes, they dug deep into their pockets to donate (she didn’t see a cent…and is still living in poverty). Another part of me wonders how much of the text “read” into the subject is really just what we chose to believe. Phrases like “the unbreakable will of the human spirit,”"the defiance of the life force against a harsh environment,”"the profound ethereal depth of the soul” abound. Sentiments easily dispatched from those living comfortably within the safety of a developed civilization with all mod cons.

So the photographer and I decided to do an experiment and alter the eyes in McCurry’s portrait. What do you get without the distraction of those marvelous eyes? What do you see when you take in the entire picture? It was what I thought all along: a portrait of a frightened overwhelmed girl. It’s a photojournalistic document taken with great detachment in the National Geographic style.

Photo portraiture is a curious category for me. In the tradition of 17th century painter Diego Velazquez – who inserted himself into family “society” group paintings – a portrait is as much about the photographer as it is about the subject. You could say that about the “greatest” portrait ever made – the Mona Lisa – since it has been speculated that Mona Lisa is, in fact, Leonardo Da Vinci painting himself as a hidden self-portrait (he did the same thing – allegedly – with the Shroud of Turin).

For me, a truly spectacular portrait is an expertly executed visual and emotional record of both the photographer and the sitter. When asked about my favorite photo portrait, there is none other than Edouard Boubat’s Lella of Bretagne. Boubat was also a photojournalist. This photograph was taken in 1947. It was a portrait of a woman Boubat admired (she was a war time nurse), was deeply in love with, and attracted to (they married after the war) You see all the components presented here: awe, sexual attraction, veneration elevated to neoclassical heroism,and starry-eyed dreaminess. (curiously, her eyes are not very prominent, though Boubat also has photos of her with downcast, even shut eyes.)

I think we are too easily misled by what we think eyes say about a person. I believe we are defined by our actions, and though there are many things a photograph can do, it can’t present a sequence in time. We are left with our own narrative to construct the moments that lead up to that photograph, and the time afterward. A person photographed brandishing a knife near someone could be attacking that person…..or removing it for safety purposes. Not waving, but drowning.

I give a pass to photographers though. We, of all people, are willing co-conspirators to the lies constructed through omission by the camera. If photographers ever get swindled by someone who happened to be born with “deep, profound, soulful” eyes and end up living miserably with a heartless, compassionless witch, the cliché is inevitable: Live by the sword, die by the sword.