Portraiture has always been a big part of photography, and it even goes back further than camera's to paintings. Portraits have always been an expression of a person, images of people showing who they are, naturally- or exposing people.
Diane Arbus is a good example of a portrait artist. She is most famously known for taking portraits for the richer families of the country in her era. The most famous shoot includes the Matthaei family.
Diane was always known to expose people, she would take her opportunity to capture the natural forms of people regardless of their appearnece.
When talking about Diane, there is aways one big individual trait, empathy.
In photography, empathy is often very rare, as the subject of portraits is a very harsh subject. It's to show reality, and empthasising with the people you are taking images of creates a darker, deeper meaning that isn't often shown through images.
Due to Diane's individuality, her photo's were unique and remarkable.
Diane was known to photograph people who would not seem normal, e.g. midgets, transvestites etc.
on the other hand, she would photograph people with a slight difference to other people in the world, a unique difference, once again reffereing to her feeling empathy for them.
Diane killed herself in july 1971, this was a massive metephor for what was going on at the time. With all the terror around, it represented that, if a person who captures all these memories and people in terms of finding their beauty within an ugly body, she can't cope with all the evil and death destroying every person she belived to be a pure beauty.
Tony Vaccaro was also a huge successful photographer.
Tony's traits included catching people off gaurd. This was his way of grasping who people are. In their utmost natural forms. He believed that people knew who people were in an image, and this gave him motive to strive and find that true soul inside a body of any human.
Tony's most famous portrait is of Pablo Picasso, this was because Pablo tried to hide from having a portrait image taken for several years, Pablo decided that he'll let Besson take a couple images for him, but Bresson admitted that the portraits did not show who he truely was. Tony was asked to do a photo shoot for Picasso, With picasso posing for the camera, Tony was not happy, so he used the excuse of his camera breaking, at this point Picasso had relaxed, and at this precise point, Tony grabbed the moment and took the picture.
All of Tony's work is his way of showing who people are when it comes to portraits.
To conclude, looking through a history of portraiture, the insanely huge diversity of change that has occured through time is absolutely astonishing. From painted portraits of kings and queens where the image can be painted to miss out blemishes or spots, in the most extreme cases, the person's body would be changed and altered to make them look prehaps thinner, or more well built, this would give out a false representation to who ever the subject was.
To the more recent forms of portaiture of Larry Clarke, who took images of his lifestyle, friends, drug consumption and the way the scene of the world was at his era.
With clarke being an insider to his 'Clan' he captured the images, with no intenetion of making it as a professional photographer, if anything you could judge Clarke's work as a massive decisive moment, capturing the images that not many people would have seen involving the punk age.
Over-all the subject of portraits have changed hugely over the years of art, Personally I believe that an image should be in it's purest form, hence old paintings of kings and queen's, I have no interest in.
Using a modern camera can take an image that only takes a millionth of a second to capture, making sure that the image is in it's truest form, such as Larry Clarke's work.
Landan this is very good and insightful. I wonder if you could add a final conclusion detailing the journey that Portraiture has come from paintings of kings to the immersed world of Larry Clarke?
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