All photographs on this site are © Peter Lavery and may not be reproduced without permission

Years ago, soon after I left the Royal College of Art, I acquired a two-volume set of Women of All Nations, a kind of anthropological survey of world-wide types and customs. The book was generously endowed with exotic photographs of tribeswomen from every corner of the globe. Revisited today, such a publication – a memento of worlds that have by and large disappeared – is a mere curiosity and probably scientifically suspect as well. Yet something about the variety and scope of the people portrayed caught my fancy. One day, I naively dreamed, I might be in a position to take advantage of any travels that photographic assignments brought my way and make portraits for myself of people in foreign lands who interested me. By the time the opportunity came – and, as important, a necessary awareness that the moment had arrived – I had been taking pictures of people of note all over Britain and abroad, both celebrities and ordinary folk elevated to the pages of the Sunday colour supplements of newspapers like the Times or Telegraph or Observer. The experience of this work in due course guided me in my approach to making the portraits presented in my books. But there was one big difference. I was now free (and eager) to photograph people who were not the object of editorial curiosity.

In 1988, a project concerning the rain forests of Brazil coupled with the interest of the Observer magazine took me to the remote Yawalapiti tribe of the upper Xingu River, in Brazil. Here I planned to bring together various strands of my earlier experience of making portraits. I went to the rain forest with a piece of black velvet cloth, thick, heavy, and some twenty feet square. I knew that I wanted to play down the exoticism of my subjects. I knew that I was interested in the being under the body paint or feathers and primitive weapons. I was not going to be sidetracked by the trappings but was out to capture the simple and essential human character that lay under the strange, colourful exterior. Wanting my sitters to be believable as people, I was not going to ennoble them or to dictate to them their expressions. As much as possible, I wanted to keep myself, the photographer, out of the picture. Simply said but not easy to do. The use of a cloth backdrop, of course, is as old as photography itself.

My portraits treat the human face and what is in it as the sole issue. From the start, I try to isolate the person being photographed from any competing background that will distract the viewer's eye. At the same time, to keep the sitter at ease (thereby allowing him or her to reveal everyday moods and emotions), I held my subjects as close to their surroundings as possible. In Brazil, my black background was many times hung by the very doorways of the tribesmen's thatched huts. In Greenland, amongst the Inuit hunters, I draped my cloth over the nearest ice outcrop. In each case, the sitter was not on my territory but on his own. In the finished picture we may see him against a neutral background but for his part he is looking out on his immediate, everyday world.

The longer I take to make a picture the more I lose my subject – that is, lose the unguarded look that he or she first offered me. Therefore I try to keep contact with my sitters brief. It is always daunting to see the quality one is trying to capture in a face drift away or completely change. From a possible five to twenty exposures, it often turns out that my initial picture is the one I ultimately use.

The photographs chosen for this site are highly selective. As will be readily apparent and there is no aim here to set forth artificial symmetries. My interest has always been in individuals, not types. My aim has not been sociological documentation but the production of an artistic object, the photograph. In the end, the quality of the photograph as a photograph, an individual object, has been my sole criterion for inclusion or exclusion. Whole series of pictures – of Irish ghillies, of French waiters, of Italian farmers – I found ultimately wanting in some element and so have kept out of the current choice.

On rereading the foregoing pages, I am reminded how close to an obsession has been my concern with keeping myself out of the portraits I make. And yet only the other day someone who knows my work well and is also aware of my abiding aesthetic precept remarked after studying a number of my photographs in succession that she recognized little bits of me, certain traits or quirks, in them. Have I come short of my ideal, then? I hope not. Still, the observation – no doubt kindly meant and in no way a damning criticism – brings to mind those lapidary words of Jorge Luis Borges, who noted that

"A man sets himself the task of depicting the world. Year after year, he fills a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that out of this patient labyrinth of lines emerge the features of his own face."

I ponder this revelation; it makes me uneasy but perhaps the import is salutory. There is a mystery in all art that is beyond us fully to direct or control. Knowing this, I am cheered.

Peter Lavery, Minety Wiltshire, May 2000.

Taken from 'my portraits', an extract from his recent book 'of humandkind'.