Portraiture

Journey of Portraiture 

The earliest known surviving portraits, that aren't of emperors or kings were the funeral portraits that were painted in Egypt. These are the only surviving paintings from the classical world that have survived.

Ancient Egyptian/Roman Funeral Portrait

The Ancient Greeks and the Romans used it in their sculptures. The people wanting the portraiture were looking for individualized and realistic portraits, even if the portraits aren't flattering. After, during the 4th century, people who wanted portraiture began to want a more idealized symbol of what the person looked like.

Then during the middle ages, true portraits of the appearance reappeared in Tomb monuments, donor portraits, miniatures in illuminated manuscripts and then panel paintings.
The ancient civilization of Peru was one of the first that produced Portraits. These Portraits were the first to truly produce a persons features in good detail. However the people who were portrayed were members of the ruling elite, priests, warriors and distinguished artisans because the production of these portraits were expensive due to the time and effort that was required during production.

One of the best known portraits, of the Western world, is the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. The world's oldest currently known portrait was found in 2006 in Vilhonneur (southwest France) and is thought to be roughly 27,000 years old.

Today, Portrait photography is a very popular industry all over the world. Nowadays people have professionally made family portraits hanging in their homes or have portraits to show special events such as weddings etc.

The popularity of portraits has increased since the 19th century due to the reduction in cost to produce a portrait. Before the 19th century, only the rich (e.g. royalty) could afford portraits whereas today portraits are inexpensive to produce because we can use a camera which takes less time, effort and materials than it does to produce a portrait via painting.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer who was known for her black and white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people" (this included dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers) or people who by normality seem ugly or surreal. Arbus believed that a camera could be "a little bit cold, a little bid harsh" however through this truth was brought out in the pictures.

This truth was the difference between what people wanted others to see in their photos and what was really there (the flaws). Diane Arbus committed suicide on July 26, 1971 by taking barbiturates and slashing her wrists with a razor.

An example of her work is of the Matthaei family. In several of the portraits of the family, Marcella is seen interacting with her parents and siblings however when Arbus photographed her alone and isolated, we see her stand stiff, her face expressionless and her eyes have thick bags under them.
This allowed us to see what Marcella really felt like under the surface of the family dynamic.

Marcella Matthaei