Genur.art

Low-key, high-contrast black-and-white portrait photograph of an elderly woman in a tight close-up against a pure black background. Her face is deeply lined, with furrows across her forehead, creases around her eyes and mouth and loose, weathered skin along her jaw. Long dark hair falls from beneath a thick crocheted knit cap. She wears a dark cable-knit sweater over a collared shirt, with the collar points just visible at her neck. She gazes upward and to the right. The inner ends of her brows are drawn up and together, her eyes glisten with a thin film of moisture and her lips are pressed tightly shut with the corners turned slightly down. A single narrow beam of hard light from the upper left falls only on her forehead, one cheekbone, the bridge of her nose and the wet shine in her eyes. The rest of her face sinks into deep shadow. Black fills most of the frame: her far cheek, her neck and her shoulders fade into darkness, and the knit textures show only where the light grazes them. The image is underexposed, with crushed blacks and very few bright highlights. It’s shot with a short telephoto lens of about 105mm at a wide aperture, so the perspective is compressed, the depth of field is shallow and her eyes are in razor-sharp focus. The image looks like aged 35mm black-and-white film, with heavy coarse grain, slight tonal unevenness and a faint dark vignette at the edges.