Portraiture

Portraiture has been a style of photography for a long time, dating back to many decades ago. At first they were used by the rich and wealthy to show power and authority, for example, kings and queens would often have portraits done of themselves. However, nowadays this technique can be used to show emotions and feelings as well as catching photographs of people by surprise can show unprepared reactions.

Portraits are also used to give people an identity, such as mug shots used for prisoners. The content of portraiture seemed to change following the invention of the camera. Photographers such as Tony Vaccaro would often do portraiture and take images at the 'decisive' moment, catching his subjects by surprise and generating unexpected reactions of people within the photographs. This is just one way in which photographers have developed portraiture and there are a vast number of artists that take portraiture pictures in a different way to how they used to be taken when they were first used.

Another example of a photographer that did portraits is Diane Arbus. She would take photographs of people with extreme circumstances such as deformities and disabilities. She has been described as "the photographer of freaks". Her most famous photographs are that of a boy holding a toy hand grenade and her photo of identical twins in New Jersey. All of her images were in black and white. She began as a writer doing advertisements with her brother Allan for her father's company and then moved onto photography later in her career. Sadly she committed suicide in 1971 after suffering from depression. Despite this, her work to this day remains of intense interest and her life was also the basis of the 2006 movie Fur.

Conversely, another photographer, Larry Clark began doing portraits but he had his own twist on the subject. Clark would take photographs of the life that he lived, this consisting of taking drugs, having underage sex and showing the traditional masculinity of males through violence in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Some film makers and photographers would say that they were influenced by Larry's work, but others have criticized it for showing graphic scenes of things people would not usually like to see: especially with people that they do not know. In ways, his photography was like a diary as it was his own life in a story of pictures. He then went on to do Filmography with several films, the most famous being Kids in 1995. Similar to his photographs, he always got criticism for showing such explicit and depicting footage of children known to be underage having sex and taking drugs. On the other hand he has been elected as a nominee for various awards in his life, this showing that his work was very famous and different in a way that know other has done the same.