Images of people have always been very popular, from the early cave paintings to images of Egyptian Pharaohs right up to modern portraits.
For years artists were the only way to capture true likeness of people, which involved long sessions and this resulted in the portrait costing a fortune. Hence the early portraits only featured royalty, the rich and the famous.
Jose Manuel Balmaceda
Although artists like Lowry featured ordinary people in their normal day to day life.
It was not until around the eighteenth century that the increase for good, low cost, portraits and the development of photography (sorry) made portraits more available to people. Film stars, music hall performers, singers suddenly found a new medium available to promote themselves.
Irving Penn, for example, took a series of portraits entitled “Small Trades” which featured tradesmen with the tools of their trade.
Suddenly everyone could create a portrait of a loved one, their family, their pets or their friends.
Becky
Today, portrait photographs have another use, that of identification of people. When I started this course I had my photograph taken for my college ID card, which is becoming more and more common place with many companies now insisting on ID photographs. In fact Richard Avedon used to take ID photographs when he joined the Merchant Marine’s Photographic section.
Jim from this course takes wedding photographs, which include the portraits of the happy couple and their guests, amongst other photographs.
Suzy, also from the course, takes animal portraits and rock band concert photography.
So portraits are a art form, as well as an area of photography that is here to stay, and with the increases in technology, can only lead to further changes in the genre.
Ironically, some photographic editors are now used to create artistic impressions from actual photographs. Obviously artistic talents are still important.
