Blog post 1 – Introduction to Portraiture

A photograph is a portrait when you capture somebody or something, often connecting to an issue that the photographer or a common issue people face in life. A selfie can be a portrait, a self-portrait, but majority of the time it doesn’t depict anything. That issue, essence, or story is what makes a portrait good, it makes it interesting or highlights a certain part of the human body. There’s many types of portraits for all different reasons. From a blog of a portrait photographer, they say that the difference is the intent. While they both capture a subject, but a photograph captures the certain moment in time rather than personality. Portraits takes up a lot of time, considering the subject’s lightening, composition, color, and the overall mood/personality it would give. What makes a portrait better than another is the amount of detail and the planning you can visibly think. What makes a professional glamour portrait more advanced is the lightening and the setting compared to the casual mirror picture (which could be a photograph rather than a portrait).`

An abstract representation can be more-so capturing the essence of the person rather than the finer details. to provide a message that is more deeper than the human body. Or a collage of faces stitched together can document the family the deeper bound between both subjects. The example below is the ties of an older guardian and a younger kid in the same family tree.

(Family Tree by Bobby Neel Adams)

Lastly, I believe a still-life of just objects can technically be a portrait. With careful arrangement and shows a certain story behind a person or people, it can be a portrait (some might just be more shallow than the others).