I was just looking through old family photos from Taiwan and my parents' early years here in the US, and I just realized there is a type of portrait that I take that is obviously influenced by the way my dad and relatives all take photos (which I guess is a very common way to take pictures around the world): posing people smack dab center in the scene that you want to record, for posterity's sake. This is where we were, this is what we looked like, this is who we visited. Subjects are usually standing straight, facing straight towards the camera. (This photo illustrates what I'm talking about.) Some of the best examples I have deserve a separate post: they are a series of pics of my uncle, in a business suit with a briefcase in hand, standing in the middle of a rice paddy, in front of his childhood home, on the tarmac at the airport, with some old farmers (relatives)...together, it seems like they were taken in a span of 5 minutes.

Anyhow, bring me back from my tangent: looking at my pics from the previous post, and through other portraits, I see that this style of portrait pops up repeatedly, no matter how hard I've tried to switch styles. It's funny, because when I was a teen and just starting out with photography, and very self-conscious that my home, my environment was so vastly different from my peers' lifestyles, I purposely tried to omit the background in pics of family members, or around my home, trying to mimic that (then) new WASP-y yuppie style that is now a Pottery Barn signature: close-focused, black and white, shallow depth of field. Of course, I now embrace everything that once embarrassed me, which means I embrace 'packratting' details into my pictures to help tell the story.

But, even with my latest style preference for shooting portraits, I still cannot get that centering out of my system: it's in my DNA.

Below, some more "Vintage Meanjean" portraits to go with the Calle Conde pics from the previous post: