Savitri
Richard O'Farrell
The image instantly catches my attention as it presents a beautiful young girl, who we're informed to be an albino girl by the artist's statement, and I feel privileged or lucky to have seen this image.
This image stood out to me in the gallery, largely due to my liking for uniqueness and individuality naturally drawing my attention.
It is a portrait of a young albino girl, front profile, and her head is ever so slightly tilted to her right.
Her eyebrows are lightly tense, while she provides a Mona Lisa smile; creating a strangely comfortable expression coming from the subject. She is seen wearing a thin floral hair band, a dark bobby pin, a beady necklace, and a white patterned shirt.
O'Farrell is perhaps ultimately trying to convey the enigmatic abilities which physical disorder can bring; be it blindness or albinism. This is achieved through manipulating some techniques; low aperture(great depth of field) and black and white setting. The lights are coming from above, not directly, but slightly more from the subject's right. It seems like he used a reflector to light up the shoulders and lower part of the neck.
I like this image. It is strange at first glance, and asks for attention like a rhetorical question. It is often an expectation to meet the eyes of the subject in a portrait, which is not the case for O'Farrell's image of “Savitri” – perhaps this is the first step into the image – and that draws us in.
Perhaps O'Farrell tried to highlight her uniqueness and incredible intelligence by reflecting her ability to focus in his photography. This was somewhat effectively achieved through his usage of low aperture.
However what he did more effectively in this image is highlighting her closed eyes. I think the black and white photography helped to accent her strange appearance; the unusually light colour of the eyebrows and eyelashes. It has also hidden the surprise of albinism, which possibly could not have been noticed immediately by the general audience without the help of the artist's statement.
She has her eyes closed tight(the artist tells us that she is blind), with her eyebrows lightly knit. It is a reminder that people with one(or more) disabled senses out of the five, develops other remaining four(or less) senses to a higher state than a person with all five senses. It looks as if she's intimately concentrating on other senses, such as listening, or smelling, and somewhat confronts the viewer that she is not watching through her eyes, but perceiving through her other senses.
It is thus, to some extent, intimidating to look at this image, however peaceful simultaneously, and this combination develops a quaint atmosphere which seamlessly captivates the viewer.
