Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — A portrait with a politician or a world leader means a shift of power. A person in position yields to the photographer and the camera, vulnerable to its capability to build — or break — through a single image. The master photographer Richard Avedon understood how the process of portrait-making could leave even the mighty unguarded and anxious, as he observed during his sittings with Henry Kissinger. “Isn’t it trivializing and demeaning,” he wrote, “to make someone look wise, noble (which is easy to do), or even conventionally beautiful when the thing itself is so much more complicated, contradictory, and, therefore, fascinating?”
Hours before the flurry of the vice presidential debate, a room in UST’s Quadricentennial Pavilion became not only a brief stop for the vice presidential candidates but also a makeshift studio for their portraits. The resulting photographs by Jake Verzosa offer a rare insight into the personalities of these public figures prior to the face-off onstage and the rolling of the accusations and congratulations into one swell of a political tide.
