Portrait Photographs from The Old Curiosity Shop

These portraits are all cropped frames taken from the outtakes shot for The Old Curiosity Shop video that I’m still in the process of shooting and editing.  I’ve been asking various friends and family members to perform scenes from the novel or simply recite some lines here and there, which I’m slowly weaving together to form a story that sticks pretty closely to Dickens’s very long tale.  (Unlike the several other adaptations of this great book, with which I'm familiar, in this work I make use only of dialogue and narration that Dickens actually wrote for this story.  There is no paraphrasing, interpolating, simplification or modernization in the present case.  I may even employ some of the material he wrote for it that was discarded before publication.)   In the process of going over the many sections already filmed, I have been selecting still images that reflect the characters of the individuals playing the parts as much as the roles portrayed.  If one knows the book that forms the basis for this project, it's still likely that one would not immediately recognize the likenesses of Master Humphrey, Daniel Quilp, Richard Swiveller, Sally Brass, Mrs Jiniwin, Christopher Nubbles, Thomas Codlin, Mrs Jarley, or Mr Short as they are presented here, but those are precisely the fictional characters, amid all the clutter and debris, that are roughly represented in this bunch of pictures (except for the Daffodils, who are wholly themselves.)