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These are photos that show individual emotion and connections, sure, but they are all against a larger backdrop and are meant to tell the larger story. Dorothea Lange is in a separate category where I would call none of her work shown here portrait photography. This leaves us wondering with each photo of his that we see whether it is a portrait of the individual or a staged picture more closely akin to a still life or fashion propaganda piece. These are great pictures, and his work was hugely important to documenting Native Americans, but he often straddled the line between telling the story of the individual and telling the story that he wanted to tell, often posing people in inauthentic ways, dressing them in inauthentic costumes, and staging ceremonies that more closely resembled Western caricature of Native American culture than the culture itself. In between you have the photos of Edward S. Whether you see desperation, fear, resignation, strength, or anything else, you know that you are seeing the emotions of the subject, not what the photographer or the art director was trying to get them to convey.
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When you look at these portraits you know that you are looking at the “souls” of these individuals. Every picture included by Steve McCurry, on the other hand, is solely about the individual. This is a fashion photograph, or maybe a fine art photograph to some, not a picture where we get any insight into the subject itself. Annie Leibovitz is a great photographer, and has taken many great portraits, but the picture of Leonardo DiCaprio with a swan around his neck really tells me nothing of Mr. What story is the photographer trying to tell?įor me, a great “portrait” seeks to, and succeeds in, telling the story of the individual or individuals in the photograph. I looked over this list and often found myself agreeing and disagreeing with photo and photographer choices, and it always came back to the same question. This article, for me, again raised the question of “What defines portrait photography?”