Jörg of Conscientious and Miguel from Exposure Compensation have put together an great list of commentary from photographers, dealers, bloggers, etc. on the question “what makes a great portrait?” Some participants are Timothy Archibald (whose portrait of Smith and Wesson CEO Micheal Golden I’ve commented on previously), dealer Bill Hunt, photographers Amy Stein, Brian Ulrich, and Bill Sullivan amongst many, many others.

I had been mulling over this question for inclusion in Jorg’s post, but the chaos of my move to Colorado overtook my ability to participate. (Excuses, excuses.) Now, I will note some thoughts quickly here.

I personally find portraiture difficult and intimidating, so I have long avoided it in my own subject selection. For personal, art-oriented work, I gravitate to landscapes. It favors my technical inexperience, for sure; a rock or shopping cart will sit forever while you fiddle with shutter and aperture. The level of intimacy between the photographer and the subject is more than I’m equipped to deal with. A subjects’ unspoken self image is unbeatable competition to whatever I might make, which is crushing pressure when your subject is a friend or part of the family. You want to do so well.

Considering the portraiture of others that I admire, my initial thought was that a good portrait answers something deep and true about the subject. The photographer, by whatever craft or magic available, draws out something hidden within the subject and crystallizes it in an image. Underlying this perspective is the assumption that there is something inside the subject that can be consolidated into a specific image. Certainly, there are some subjects who lend themselves to this. Famous examples would be JFK, Churchill, Reagan. Yosef Karsh’s portrait of Churchill was what continued to come to mind.

Yet, the more I considered this view, I came to understand I had failed to consider a third player in the portrait – the viewer. A good portrait creates an opportunity for the viewer to engage with the subject in a different way, to activate the viewer’s mind in an exploration of who the person is, what they stand for, what effect their personal history has had on their personality . The good portrait creates more questions than it answers. We, viewing the image, grind away at these questions and come to our own understanding of who a person is, through that singular instance captured by the photographer. It’s much more complex than I’d first thought. And this explains why I have a difficulty coming up with a modern example that relies on known subjects rather than unknown everyday people. Alec Soth’s portrait Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2006 is a great example.

When my son was born a few years ago, many of my personal hangups about making portraits fell away and I began taking more pictures of my family. Perhaps the truest answer, for me, would be what am I trying to achieve when I snap that shutter on my son? Here, I fall back on the first approach. As a parent, I am trying to capture what he was like at that moment in time. Perhaps that’s a naive and unsophisticated approach, but that’s where I’m at in those specific instances when my son’s expression trigger the urge to photograph.

• What makes a great portrait? at Conscientious
• What makes a great portrait? at Exposure Compensation