The first portrait photograph was made within months of the daguerreotype's public announcement in 1839. It was technically difficult, requiring the subject to sit motionless in direct sunlight for several minutes while the plate exposed, but it was immediately understood as photography's most commercially promising application. Painted portraits had for centuries been the exclusive privilege of the wealthy. A daguerreotype portrait cost a fraction of a painted miniature, and it could be made in minutes rather than the hours or days required for sitting for a painter. Within a decade, portrait photography studios had opened in every major city in the Western world, and the painted portrait miniature had been effectively displaced as a middle-class social form.
But the story of portrait photography as art rather than commerce begins in the 1860s, when a handful of photographers in England, France, and America began treating their subjects not as customers to be recorded but as personalities to be interpreted. The gap between a portrait photograph that accurately describes how someone looks and one that communicates how they are is the territory that portrait photography as art occupies, and the best portrait photographers have been navigating that gap for 160 years.
Julia Margaret Cameron: The Deliberate Blur
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) received her first camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law in December 1863, when she was 48 years old. Within months she was producing portrait photographs of a quality and ambition that had no precedent. She worked in the converted henhouse of her home on the Isle of Wight, using large glass plates and slow, unpredictable wet collodion chemistry that required intense natural light and long exposures. Her subjects included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, Sir John Herschel, and dozens of other prominent Victorian figures, all photographed in her distinctive style.
Julia Margaret Cameron, "Annie, My First Success" (1864), albumen print. Cameron considered this her first successful portrait photograph, made in January 1864 shortly after receiving her camera. The soft focus and dramatic close-up framing that she developed would influence portrait photography for generations. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Cameron's portraits were controversial because they were deliberately out of focus. Sharp detail and technical precision were the established values of portrait photography in the 1860s, and Cameron rejected both. She used close-up framing, dramatic natural side-lighting, and intentional soft focus to create portraits that emphasized psychological character over physical exactitude. Critics called the soft focus a technical deficiency. Cameron maintained it was an artistic choice.
She was right in the longer view of history. Her portraits of Herschel, with his wild white hair caught in raking light against a dark background, and her Victorian women in allegorical costumes enacting scenes from Tennyson's poetry, established the precedent for portrait photography as deliberate artistic interpretation rather than faithful documentation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and several major collections hold significant groups of her prints. They are recognized today as among the finest portraits in any medium of the Victorian era.
Nadar and the Parisian Celebrities
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known professionally as Nadar (1820-1910), was the first photographer to make celebrity portraiture into a form of cultural documentation. His Paris studio on the Boulevard des Capucines became, in the 1850s and 1860s, the place where the leading figures of French cultural life came to be photographed: Baudelaire, Delacroix, Daumier, Sarah Bernhardt, Gustave Doré, and dozens of others. His portraits were technically superior to most contemporaries' work, but their quality went beyond technique.
Portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron (c. 1870). Unusually, we have a photographic record of Cameron's own appearance from the period of her most active work, which helps contextualize her practice within the social world of Victorian intellectual and artistic life. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Nadar's portraits share a quality of individual attention: each subject appears observed rather than positioned. He was known for engaging his subjects in conversation during sittings, preferring to photograph them when they were mentally present rather than formally posed. His portrait of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, showing a slight figure with a fixed, intelligent, slightly mocking gaze, is as revealing a likeness as any written description of Baudelaire by his contemporaries. Nadar understood that a portrait's function was not to record appearance but to communicate personality.
He also pioneered photography outside the studio: he made aerial photographs from a balloon in 1858, the first aerial photographs in history, and photographed the Paris catacombs using artificial light in 1861. The same curiosity about what photography could do that produced his celebrity portraits drove him continuously toward new technical and conceptual territory.
The 20th Century: From Formality to Confrontation
The dominant tradition of early 20th-century portrait photography, associated with studios like Bachrach in America and Yousuf Karsh in Canada, maintained the formal, dignified approach of Victorian portraiture: even lighting, dignified poses, and flattering processing. Karsh's 1941 portrait of Winston Churchill, taken when Karsh snatched a cigar from Churchill's mouth just before pressing the shutter, producing the characteristic scowl of the best-known image of the wartime Prime Minister, is technically in this tradition but emotionally confrontational in a way that prefigures the next generation's approach.
Richard Avedon (1923-2004) is the figure who most decisively shifted American portrait photography from flattery toward interrogation. His fashion work for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue established him as the defining image-maker of mid-century glamour. But his personal portrait projects, including "In the American West" (1979-1984), pursued something entirely different: large-format portraits made in shadowless outdoor light against a white background, with subjects from small-town and rural Western America photographed with the same formal intensity he brought to celebrities. Coal miners, drifters, day laborers, and rodeo riders stare back at the camera with the same directness and the same visual authority as his portraits of Andy Warhol or Marilyn Monroe.
This leveling quality was Avedon's deliberate statement: the white background eliminated social context, forcing attention to the face and body, to the specific accumulated record of a life in a person's physical appearance. It was simultaneously democratic and ruthless. The subjects were photographed with complete technical mastery and zero beautification.
Contemporary Portrait Photography
Contemporary portrait photography operates across an enormous range, from the psychological intensity of Platon's close-up celebrity portraits to the conceptual self-portraiture of Cindy Sherman to the community-based documentary portraits of Dawoud Bey. What unifies the genre's artistic ambitions, across this range, is the commitment to using the specific, observable particulars of a person's appearance and demeanor to create an image that communicates something about the interior of the person or the social conditions that have shaped them.
The proliferation of portrait photography through social media and smartphone selfie culture has not diminished the genre's ambitions; if anything, it has clarified them. The difference between a selfie and a portrait by Richard Avedon or Julia Margaret Cameron is not primarily technical. It is a matter of intention, attention, and the willingness to look at a person seriously enough to find something worth showing. The same visual principles that govern great portraiture in painting, discussed in our guide to how to look at art, apply equally to photographs: what does the image ask the viewer to attend to, and why?
For the broader context of how Cindy Sherman's work reconceives the photographic portrait from the inside, our dedicated post on Cindy Sherman covers her career in detail. And for how painted portraiture handled the same challenge of psychological communication across centuries of art history, our guide to why portraits fascinate us approaches the question from a psychological angle.
Final Thoughts
Portrait photography's history is the story of a medium that arrived with utilitarian commercial purposes and was gradually converted into one of the most intimate and psychologically demanding art forms available. From Cameron's soft-focus Victorian intellectuals to Nadar's sharp-eyed Parisian celebrities, from Karsh's formally impressive political figures to Avedon's confrontational American West workers, each generation of portrait photographers has found new ways to use a recorded face as the site for investigation of identity, social condition, and the elusive interior life.
The challenge is unchanged: take a flat, static image of a specific person's external appearance and make it reveal something that the person may not have consciously offered. The best portrait photographers do this not through trick or manipulation but through sustained looking: the simple discipline of paying close attention to someone until the moment arrives when the image of that attention is worth making.
