Photo I Students Create Identity Portraits

“A true portrait, where the artist and the subject are in a dialogue, is not easy for anyone, let alone a teenager,” said Cheryle St. Onge, photography teacher at Governor’s. 

At the start of the first semester, St. Onge assigns her Photo I students an Identity (ID) Portrait project. The assignment challenges them to create a triptych—a series of three images (top, middle, and bottom)—that together capture a single aspect of a person’s identity, whether that person is a soccer player, a math whiz, a dancer, or someone else entirely.

“I created this assignment five or six years ago when I was at Exeter. I wanted to try to get kids more comfortable walking up to someone and asking if they can make their picture and more comfortable with making strong, meaningful portraits,” said St. Onge of how she started giving this assignment to her youngest students. 

At Govs, St. Onge teaches students across all levels of experience in Photo I, Photo II, and AP Photo. In addition to teaching at the collegiate level, St. Onge taught at both Phillips Exeter Academy and St. Paul's School before coming to Byfield last fall. 

The assignment builds students’ photographic and life skills. Over the course of three weeks, Photo I students truly accomplish a lot. In the first week, they do a dry run and share their triptych in class. They tend to make mistakes, such as forgetting that all three images must be horizontal, each must help convey that singular identity, and each must look interesting in black and white. In the second week, students have the opportunity to shoot again and bring new, stronger work to class for peer-to-peer critiques. In the same week, St. Onge does demonstrations in class to help strengthen students’ technical skills. In the third and final week, students crop their images and perform technical work in Photoshop.

“These students are beginners who quickly made some incredible images. They grow leaps and bounds creatively while learning some great lifelong skills,” said St. Onge.

In addition to learning how to compose images within a frame, crop three images into a triptych via contact sheet formatting, convert to black-and-white, and do general editing in Photoshop; students also learn how to approach someone, start a conversation, and quickly develop a trusting relationship such that the person will follow them to a location with better light or a cleaner background. 

The class also learned how triptychs were historically used to convey a larger idea by presenting it as a single image, and how artists explore the concept of identity in their work. They studied the works of seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (creator of the monumental triptych The Raising of the Cross) and contemporary Chinese-American photographer Tommy Kha.

"The ID portrait assignment forced me to blend my photography techniques and artistic style. I found myself pushed to capture a photo as more than just an image, but as a whole story through angles and lighting. I enjoyed the process of really seeing the triptych come to life," said Juliet Banzi ‘28, a Photo I student. 

Click here to see the works of Photo I students.