Portrait : Josef Timar

With its impressionistic approach to autobiography, Portrait charts the inner life of its author as keenly observing writer and deeply thinking photographer.

The book’s cover sets the tone of dignity mixed with louche ambiguity. The slightly dark rendering of its images enhances the drama and gravity explicit in the work while giving credence to the qualities of light portrayed, which paradoxically highlights the artifice implicit in the photographs and the narratives. 

The anomalies, artifacts, and distortions found in its pages are used for expressive effect (not so much obscuring truth and identity as drawing attention to their transience and obscurity).

The photographs strive to capture with precision the very imprecision of sight, making the dispersion of light, as thing-in-itself, the primary outward subject matter (subjugating the illumination of people and things depicted in discrete moments of time).

Much as the Sistine Chapel provides structure to Michelangelo’s frescoes, the book as a work of art (rather than a record of works of art) gives fullest form to the pictures and letters that make up this work. 

"Josef Timar has put together a marvelously cohesive body of work.  Portrait is comprised of about 500 unique portraits made on the street, accompanied by contributing captions and original prose.  This monograph lives large in my personal library.  I have trouble ending a session with it – as each portrait truly, and meaningfully tells a story.  This is a work of substance and one that I treasure. It belongs in any serious photobook collection!” – Bob Tursack