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5 Portrait Photographers of the Famous

Federico Alegría
4 min readDec 30, 2019
Self-portrait by Philippe Halsman

It is understood that a portrait is a representation of a person’s character; that’s why the most efficient way to accomplish this task is by capturing an image of the person’s face.

Photography had much to do with the production of portraits because its approach to reality surpassed painting in terms of immediacy and detail. Someone could achieve hyper-realistic results for sure, but the subject had to wait a long time, and, from the cost perspective, these kinds of portraits were inaccessible to most people.

The best portraits are the materialization of the idea of a person. That idea might come from the subject himself, or from what was expected of them by the general public. This may sound strange nowadays, because the vast majority of people have access to portraits of themselves, even if they serve insipid purposes like bureaucracy-related stuff. But this concept becomes clearer if we compare it with famous people, public figures who are recognized worldwide for something specific.

Today we’ll talk about five photographers who built and are continuing to build their careers around portraying famous people from human history. Some of these portraits have become iconic, and when we think about someone, there’s a fair chance that we picture as they are in one of these portraits.

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Federico Alegría
Federico Alegría

Written by Federico Alegría

photographer, researcher, writer and phd cand

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