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Since the beginnings of democratized photography, portraits have become more popular than most other genres due to their accessibility. Usually, professional portraits are made during special moments or personal milestones like graduations or weddings. People’s reasons for wanting a portrait are diverse – from wanting to hang the picture in their homes, to showcasing it on social media. Many people like having a professional photographer shoot their portraits, as well as those of their family members.
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Portrait photography is a popular global industry that centers on showing people according to a predetermined concept. Portraits, in general, show a certain awareness of the subject over the action of the portraitist capturing the expression the subject wants to project, or the awareness the portraitist manages to manipulate through the direction of poses. It is understood then, that a portrait is not a simple snapshot since it has a strong idealized element within it achieved through the pose (beyond the exaggeration of anatomical elements, as was done in the distant past when painting and sculpture were the only ways to create a portrait). A portrait usually manages to show the personality of a human being and even their particular mood. Portraits are images created to portray or represent a person with an emphasis on their physical gestures and face. (The veracity of the photographs we see today is highly debatable, but we won’t discuss that topic here.) What is certain is that portraits before the invention of photography responded to physical idealizations, which is why most rulers and emperors in paintings look so similar to each other. Photography broke with all this convention because photography “shows us the truth”. These exaggerations were idealizations of what was considered as beauty and strength in those epochs. Historically, portraits exaggerated people’s physical characteristics. 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. Today we'll define what portraits are, and also what environmental portraits are. Portraits are an important photographic genre – but, like all genres, there will always be variants that make a certain genre even more specialized.