What’s in a Face, Asks Mark Abrahams

“Everything I’ve learned about life and places, I’ve learned through photography,” muses photographer Mark Abrahams, whose impressive lineup of fashion and celebrity portraits is  recorded in a new self-titled volume (Damiani). It’s been a long time coming for this one-time California truck driver, whose first taste behind the lens was taking pictures of characters he encountered along the way. His is a self-taught profession, with a raw, no-artifice technique, which hasn’t really changed as he’s done countless covers for Vogue and GQ. It’s all about persoanlity for this artist who can do to much with texture and light: “Fashion is more fun to shoot but they’re all portraits anyway,” says Abrahams.

The portfolio of black-and-white pictures sees Abrahams extract ever-deeper emotion from his sometimes reticent subjects. James Frey wrote the foreward in the style of a poetic short story titled “The End of the Beginning.” If this is just the starter, the photographer assures us he’s more than happy to keep “allowing people to view his pictures through their own world experience.”