What is portrait photography?
Portrait photography shows a person, or a small group, so that the viewer learns something about them. A portrait can be a passport picture, a family photograph, a magazine cover or a long art project. What makes it a portrait is that the person is the subject, and usually knows that they are being photographed.
Main approaches
Studio portrait. A controlled setting with planned light. Yousuf Karsh made formal studio-style portraits of famous people for six decades. Richard Avedon often placed his sitters against a plain white background.
Environmental portrait. The person at home, at work or in their landscape, so that the place says something about them.
Typology and series. Many people photographed in the same way, so that the pictures can be compared. August Sander spent decades photographing Germans of all professions and classes.
Celebrity and editorial. Portraits for magazines. Annie Leibovitz became chief photographer of Rolling Stone in 1973 and later worked for Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Direct, documentary portrait. Diane Arbus made square, frontal portraits in the 1960s, often of people at the edges of society. Her pictures were posed: her subjects looked straight at the camera.
by Annie Leibovitz
History
Portraits were the first big business of photography. In the 1840s studios opened in many cities, and people sat still for long exposures, sometimes with a hidden head brace. In Scotland, the painter David Octavius Hill and the engineer Robert Adamson worked together from 1843 until Adamson’s death in 1848. With the calotype process they made portraits of well-known Scots, including ministers of the Disruption Assembly of 1843, and of the fishing community of Newhaven.
In Paris, Félix Nadar opened a portrait studio and photographed many writers, artists and actors of his time, among them Charles Baudelaire, George Sand and Sarah Bernhardt. In England, Julia Margaret Cameron started photographing at the age of 48 after her daughter gave her a camera. Her close, soft-focus portraits of people such as Charles Darwin and Sir John Herschel were unusual at the time.
In 1929 August Sander published Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), 60 portraits from his larger project People of the 20th Century. Under the Nazi regime his work was restricted. On December 30, 1941, Yousuf Karsh photographed Winston Churchill in Ottawa. Churchill refused to put down his cigar, so Karsh took it from his mouth, and the angry face became the portrait known as The Roaring Lion.
After the war, portraits became central to magazines. Avedon and Irving Penn made portraits for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and in 1967 Diane Arbus was shown in the exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art. Today most portraits are digital, and the selfie has made everyone a portrait photographer.
Techniques
Connection. The most important tool is conversation. Talk to the person, explain what you want and give them time to relax.
Light. A large window gives soft, flattering light. In the studio, photographers use classic setups such as Rembrandt lighting (a small triangle of light on the shadow side of the face) or butterfly lighting from above.
Lens and distance. Lenses from about 85 to 135mm on full frame let you stand a little farther away, which keeps facial proportions natural. Wide lenses close up make noses and foreheads look larger.
Focus on the eyes. In most portraits, the eye closest to the camera should be sharp. Modern cameras help with eye-detection autofocus.
How to start
Start with people you know, near a window. Ask them to look at you, then away, and photograph between the poses, when they stop posing. Try one location and one light before you add more. If you photograph strangers, ask first, and get a signed model release before you use the pictures commercially.
Books to start with
Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005–2016 (Phaidon, 2017). Leibovitz’s portraits from the last two decades.
August Sander, Face of Our Time (1929). Sixty portraits from Sander’s survey of German society, reprinted many times.
Yousuf Karsh, Karsh: A Biography in Images. A selection of Karsh’s best-known portraits.
by Diane Arbus
Legacy
Portraits are the most common kind of photograph. They fill family albums, passports and social media, and some, like The Roaring Lion, have become the public image of a person. The great portrait photographers showed that a picture of a face can also describe a time and a society.
Discover portrait photographers · Portrait photography in the Photopedia Dictionary
Last updated: November 2026
