Learn English with the News: “Portraits”

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“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, said Pablo Picasso. Isn’t that a beautiful quote? Today’s news article is about art, so let’s let it enjoy it.

Let’s go!

1. Read the text
2. Understand the vocabulary
3. Watch the video

Text

Ground-breaking portraiture that is almost 150 years old. The images are part of an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – a retrospective of Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the greatest portraitists in the history of photography.

Senior curator of photographs at the Met, Malcolm Daniel, says Cameron’s brilliance lay in her pioneering vision.

– She was not really interested in documentation of how people looked. It wasn’t, as she said, about matte-making and skeleton-rendering of the form. It was about finding the inner spirit, the inner soul, of the person. And where most professional photographers aimed for absolute clarity and quick exposures she did the opposite. She slowed down the exposures so that it would purposely register a certain movement of the sitter, a certain sense of breadth, and make the person feel a little more alive.

Cameron’s innovative style was informed by her interest in painting and by her social circle, which included artists and poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and painters from the Pre-Raphaelite movement. A mother of six and deeply religious, she only started creating her images at the age of 48.

The show includes masterpieces from each of Cameron’s three major bodies of work and is on view at the Met through early January 2014.

Vocabulary

Ground-breaking – Characterized by originality and innovation.

Portraiture – the art of making portraits. Portraits are a painting, drawing, or photograph of a person that usually only includes the person’s head and shoulders.

Retrospective – of or relating to the past or something that happened in the past.

Curator – a person who is in charge of the things in a museum, zoo, etc..

Exposures – the fact or condition of being affected by something or experiencing something :the condition of being exposed to something.

Breadth – the quality of including many things : the wide scope or range of something.

Masterpieces – a great book, painting, piece of music, movie, etc.

Video