To respond adequately, we need to establish some background. Of all the photographs made during the first two decades following the invention of photography, it is estimated that 99% of them were portraits. That is not surprising, since much of art consists of portraits. There is a long tradition of the titled, the well-known and the affluent sitting for a formal portrait—in oil, of course. The advent of photography in 1839 meant that everyone could have a picture of themselves and their families. Portrait studios in England, Scotland, France and America soon were producing prints of scientists, divines, artists, writers, generals and politicans—but also of street vendors, shopkeepers, whores and even street urchins. The Dauguerrotypist's tent was ubiquitous near any Civil War encampment, and the cost was such that even the lowliest private could have his picture taken. The tintype, Ambrotype and the carte de visite were about as common as baseball trading cards were to become in the middle of the next century. Regardless of the process, the emphasis was on the subject—did the camera capture a good likeness?—and the criterion of success was the approval of the sitter. But well before the technology was into its second decade, the raison d'être for an image of an individual was not invariably the making of a good likeness. Some photographers took pictures of criminals and lunatics, in the hope of assisting criminologists and policy-makers to discern the characteristics of the aberrant personality. A good likeness was the least of their concerns. Travelers to exotic lands brought back images of pashas and aborigines, of pygmies and geishas, and few viewers ever asked if they were good likenesses. It was sufficient to show an elaborate costume, a painted face, tattoos, nose rings, and non-Aryan features. When was the last time the clerk at the Motor Vehicle office asked you if you here pleased with the photo ID she just took? The point is that we do not expect all pictures of people to be good likenesses. Some are merely functional, but others are intended to be good images, first and foremost. By the middle of the twentieth century photographers raised the question explicitly, asserting that a good likeness was not the ultimate criterion. Phillipe Halsman, one of the leading commercial portraitists said that the best portrait is an unmasking of the subject— “If the photograph of a human being does not show a deep psychological insight, it is not a true portrait but an empty likeness.” That strikes me as pretentious crap—even psychotherapists after months of consultation rarely claim to have achieved deep psychological insight into their patients. But Halsman was on to something significant. He shifted the emphasis away from the sitter to suggest that the photographer's insight, perspective or personal style was important. Arnold Newman, who died recently, proclaimed that before any portrait can be a good portrait it has to be a good photograph. His concern was not insight but on the relationship between the sitter and his/her environment—the space he/she inhabits. It seems to us that what is central to much recent portraiture (apart from the gimmicks and the dreadful stuff cranked out in the shopping malls) is the concept of the interpretive portrait—where the photographer and/or the viewer is expected to bring something to the meaning of the image. OK, you say,
but what the hell does that mean? A good likeness is often important,
especially
if it is family or a well-known figure.
But it can't stop with that. Newman usually included the space the
sitter inhabited—his tools, working environ, style of dress—and
the term usually applied to those images was environmental
portraits.Others
eliminated all that and shot their subjects against a plain drop
cloth. Some, like Richard
Avedon, often moved in very tight on their
subjects and captured every blemish, stray hair, and wrinkle. A few
of Dorothea Lange's The involvement need not be as emotional as that Lange evokes. It can be as simple as summoning forth the recollection of a painting of Georgia O'Keefe or Josef Albers when we see them posed against a background that suggests their work. That involvement may also be evoked by the recognition of an artistic tradition (or the defiance of a tradition) as when Paul Strand poses a krone from the Hebrides in the manner of a woman of the Spanish nobility as Goya might have painted her. On that note, let us return to the pueblo. We regard this as a fine portrait because of the formal composition—the arrangement of light and dark areas, the elimination of the irrelevant and the inclusion of enough of the environment (the ladder and the shape and texture of the adobe walls) to tell us something more about the subject. We don't need to know which pueblo, just as we don't need to know the subject's name to appreciate it. The pose is relaxed, even casual, and there is a bemused expression on her face. We recognize that the shawl and long skirt over pants was not a conventional, middle American style, but it is not quite exotic. No pottery, weaving, silver work—she is treated as a person, not an archetype or category. You've probably seen promotional photos for the Southwest with women balancing fancy pots on their heads, or dressed up in their finery and silver-and-turquoise jewelry siting at a loom weaving a rug with sheep grazing in the background—what commercial hokam! There are more nineteenth century portraits on this website in the history section, and we have prepared an activity designed to provide some practice in working out your own approach to an interpretive portrait. Before you proceed to that assignment, we suggest you go to the Feature section (use the link below) to examine two more portraits very closely. This is the third
issue of a website devoted to approaching photography as an art
form that (mostly) embraces the traditional canons of drawing and
painting—which is to say there is an emphasis here on line,
shape, color, light, perspective, texture, and so on. We appreciate
that there is much more to photography than that, but an awareness
of traditions— from Lascaux to Rauschenberg—may be
useful to beginning and intermediate photographers as they explore
and experiment. There will certainly be treatment of the craft
and technical aspects, but our focus will be on composition in
the very broadest sense of that term. There
are two basic questions we will pose—What do you point
your camera at? and Where do you stand? When one
addresses those questions many of the other decisions are fairly
well determined. We invite you to explore this issue and tell
us what you think. |
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Consider
the image of the pueblo woman I bought recently on eBay for
a few dollars. There was no information about it—not
when it was taken, of whom, or by whom. There is nothing of particular
anthropological interest, nothing striking about the pose
or her expression, and we can't even be sure whether
she is a native American or just a tourist in a shawl. It was
probably made by an amateur— it is a small print (3" x
4½")—in
the 1920s or 30s. The develop- ment and printing was incompetent.
Nevertheless, we consider it a fine portrait, not just a snapshot.
Why? 
best
portraits, like this one, don't even show all of her subject's face,
or show it largely obscured
by a hand or an elbow. What is common among these approaches is
that the photographers are willing to suggest something—a
connection, an attitude, an issue unresolved. They suggest by what
they include and what they exclude—their distance from the
subject, what part of the face is left in shadow, what the sitter
is doing
with her hands, and so on. That means that we, the viewers, are now
actively involved, not just passive observers. How can one not be
involved with the 
