the presentation of self in everyday life

Have you ever read Erving Goffman?  I've been kind of obsessed with him lately.  This photograph reminds me of something he once wrote in the book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

The expressiveness of the individual appears to involve two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off.

Goffman takes hundreds of pages to gloss this statement (he does so beautifully--please go read the book--it is great for geeks like you and me).  Since I am now facing the world as a photographer, I have worked through his densely packed text by (quite sensibly) taking photographs:

That's not, technically, a PERFECT shot.  Not even close.  Hell, not even remotely close.  It's an imperfect shot of imperfect subjects at an imperfect time in an imperfect world.  Yet, I love it.  I really treasure this image.  Why?

Like Goffman said, we are the sum of two aspects in any conversation: what we say ("give"), and what we portray in and around and behind what we say (or "give off").  A picture of a mother, with her child, and her child soon to be born--that's what I'm saying.  That's what the subjects in the picture are saying.  But, what makes me look again and again at their faces, their hands and feet and knees--it's what they are portraying that makes the image whole.  Two people, loving, comfortable and comforted, facing a future of siblings and uncertainty and happiness while wholly connected.  That's what this image "gives off".

I'm going to keep thinking about that.  I come into photo shoots with goals: take pictures of X subjects with X types of shots with X poses in X locations.  These are FAMILY PORTRAITS.  That's what I'm saying.  But what is the other aspect of the conversation?  How is what I am expressing both what I give, and what I give off? --xo