The Difference Between Environmental Portrait And Portraiture

A portrait is a form of biography. Its purpose is to inform now and to record for history.

Arnold Newman

Let’s face it. We love taking photographs, and in many cases, these pictures include people. A lot of the images that we see depicting people fit comfortably within the genre of portraiture. Portraits have been with humanity throughout history and have left us not only with a huge number of images of faces, but also a legacy that shows who our ancestors were and who we are today.

We can find portraits in art galleries and books, and they have become treasures for many families and are a fundamental part of even routine things such as the bureaucracies that require our IDs. Portraits show us who we are.

Portraits are an important photographic genre — but, like all genres, there will always be variants that make a certain genre even more specialized. Today we’ll define what portraits are, and also what environmental portraits are. Through this, we hope to establish the clear difference between the two photographic styles to understand that while both are technically “portraits”, one of them tries to tell us a deeper and more human story.

Historically, portraits exaggerated people’s physical characteristics. These exaggerations were idealizations of what was considered as beauty and strength in those epochs. Photography broke with all this convention because photography “shows us the truth”. (The veracity…