Photographers:Portraiture

Irving Penn

Corner portraits: created an environment to see how subjects reacted.

Julia Margaret Cameron Closely cropped portraits have influenced contemporary photographers

Started photography at 48. unconventional in their intimacy and visual outcome of created blur.This was achieved through both long exposures, where the subject moved and by leaving the lens intentionally out of focus.

Richard Avedon

there is barely a trace of the theatrical expressiveness or theextravagant gestures that avedon elicits from the actors,singers or writers who sit for him. these portraits areexpressive nevertheless. their hard physical labour, theharshness of their everyday lives, their struggle for survival,has etched their features and their souls as a river gougesout a canyon. their faces become landscapes, and their bodiesterritories, on which they carry their garments around with them.

Truman Capote

Earned his reputation as a fashion photographer, his greatest achievement has been his reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture.

his ability to express the essence of his subject using little else in the frame.

avedon’s pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous.

the portraits are often well lit and in front of white backdrops, with no props or extraneous details to distract from their person - from the essential specificity of face, gaze, dress, and gesture. when printed, the images regularly containthe dark outline of the film in which the image was framed.

Lee Friedlander

Butcher

Lee Friedlander

Started documenting Gay and transsexual communities in NYCIn 1990s began to document AIDS epidemic as she lost many of her close friendsContinues to document marginalised groups within society.

Nan Goldin

Uses herself and her circumstances as subject matter

David Bailey

Sian Bonnell

Cindy Sherman manipulates her own body by means of make-up, clothes and artificial body parts, and stages herself as various figures that she invents or re-invents, after which she photographs herself in her studio.

Richard Billingham

the door to family life, usually closed, was kicked wide open.

Arnulf Rainer

Barry Lewis

Bettina von Zwehl

Bill Brandt

Brassai

David LaChapelle

Duane Michals

Don McCullin

Elliot Erwitt

Erwin Blumenfeld