Portrait Photography

In portrait photography, also called portraiture, the focus of the photograph is the person's face. Portraiture involves depicting a human subject through the art of painting. The artist's function, though it was once open for debate, was both to capture the personality of the subject and to "improve upon nature." While this was so, the significance or prestige of the individual being depicted determined the level of exactness that was expected in the rendering of that individual's portrait. The search for an exact representation of the subject led Louis Daguerre to invent a mechanical method of capturing light on a flat surface. At that point, the photograph quickly became the medium of choice among those seeking and creating portraits. Early portraitists from eras ranging from the Roman Empire to the British Empire have attempted to capture everything from an idealized spiritual likeness of their subjects to exact copies of their physical specimens. While portraiture varied in every culture, and the standards differed even more, one uniform aspect of portraiture was that the artist was typically bound by the unwritten rules of their trade. Early photographers, however, were without the academic and commercial restrictions of their counterparts. As a result, their work was typically rich in artistic experimentation. Talbot and Bayard, two early photographers, were especially enthralled with the new medium and produced intimate, personalized work.