An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography

By photographing a person in their natural surroundings, it is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features. It is also thought that by photographing a person in their natural surroundings, the subject will be more at ease, and so be more conducive to expressing themselves, as opposed to in a studio, which can be a rather intimidating and artificial experience.

ALFRED SANDER

Sander was born in Herdorf the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom.

He spent his military service (1897–1899) as a photographer’s assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in linz, Austria, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne.

In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work people of the 20th century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the cologne progressives a radical group of artists linked to the workers movement

In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed.

Sander’s Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Doblin titled “On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth”. Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing socialists worker party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander’s book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed.

Around 1942, during westawald he left Cologne and moved to the small village of Kuchhausen, in the westerwald region; this allowed him to save the most important part of his body of work. His Cologne studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid, but tens of thousands of negatives, which he had left behind in a basement near his former apartment in the city, survived the war. 25,000 to 30,000 negatives in this basement were then destroyed in a 1946 fire.

In 1962, 80 photographs from the People of the 20th Century project were published in book format, under the name Deutschenspiegel. Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (German Mirror. People of the 20th Century).

Sander died of a stroke on 20 April 1964. He was buried next to his son Erich in Cologne’s Melaten cemetery .

An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography.

By photographing a person in their natural surroundings, it is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features. It is also thought that by photographing a person in their natural surroundings, the subject will be more at ease, and so be more conducive to expressing themselves, as opposed to in a studio, which can be a rather intimidating and artificial experience.

For my environmental portrait I will photograph a fishmonger at Homefields

I will be taking photos of the worker while focusing on light and angles.

I will conduct this shoot at some point in the next week.

I am designing the shoot in this way to take photos which represent the busy life of a Fishmonger. I will produce the best images by working with the worker to find the best lighting angle.

Contact Sheets

Here I have shown evidence of me creating collections in Lightroom, I have created multiple different collections such as Hampton objects and Hampton buildings. This helps me organise all of my photographs, like separating images those that are blog friendly, and the images that I would like to edit.

Editing and Final Images

Below I have demonstrated how I have edited some of my images to make certain features more prominent such as the sign below being brighter bringing out the yellow and reds in the image. Furthermore, editing the image of the shoes to create the texture more visible and the whites in the image lighter, as when I took the image the lighting in the room was limited. My favourite aspect of this image is its simplicity and the brighter yellow contrasting with the duller brown floor background.

I like how in Lightroom you can used the before and after function to compare how you have edited your images, like her where I have edited this image of some pots, located in the cooking house at Hampton. I like how I toned done on the colours in the image, giving it a more rustic and old fashioned look. In addition, I adjusted the clarity to make the individual pots more legible and the wall in the background now being whiter makes matches better with the dull browns in the image, making it more cohesive.

Mood board –

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Environmental portrait ideas

• Make the person the main focus of the photo, posing.
• Subject is not posing, natural action.
• Photo of a person in an environment where they feel most comfortable e.g. favourite walk, workplace, space in their house, shop, hobby, etc.
• Create a story with the subject with what they are doing/where they are.
• Use more than 1 person.
• Fill the frame with essential elements, not becoming too crowded and distract from the main focus.

What do environmental portraits say about us?

Environmental portraits help us to create strong stories for who it involves by giving further details into who they are and what they do, showing their personalities without us even knowing who they are. The objects and locations involved show how they relax, what they do in their spare time/how or who they spend it with, what they may do in their day to day lives.

What do they mean?

An environmental portrait is a type of photography which means showing someone in their natural environment which they might find to be safe and comforting.

What are environmental portraits?

Environmental portraits are photographs which are created through the filters, body-shot, compositions, angles, backgrounds and surroundings which we see through photos. This could be through the subject holding them or the viewer finding them through looking at the photo and exploring it with their eyes because they are supposed to catch peoples eyes and make them wonder and think about the subject more.

Photographer research

Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015)

Research –

• Born on March 20th 1940 Pennsylvania, United States.
• Her first camera was the Kodak Brownie.
• An American photographer.
• She is known best for her 1960s documentary images of counterculture.

Here are some examples of her work:

Image analysis –

Michelle Sank

Research –

• Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1953, but left to go to Exeter in 1987.
• A South-African photographer.
• Her work can be found in the Museum of fine arts in Houston.

Examples of her work –

Image analysis –

Contact Sheets

While at Hamptonne we got to photograph the Living History characters, which included the Goodwyf and the Wool Spinners. We aske the characters to move around and hold different objects so that we could get a wider range of photos. We also got the chance to work with Tom Kennedy, who help us to get different lighting throughout the shoot.

Editing

I have edited my favourite portraits in Lightroom and because most of them were taken inside and at at different angles toward the light, so were darker so I had to adjust the exposure so that Goodwyfs face can be seen more clearly. I have also changed that contrast in my portraits to make them brighter and seem like they were taken in a space with more lighting.

Final Portraits

I have picked these as my final portraits because I think that they have good lighting which shows the Goodwyfs features and what they would have wore during that time. In Lightroom, I have edited a couple so that they are in black and white and have adjusted different settings so that they photo can be seen more clearly. My favourite photo would be the first one when the Goodwyf is looking into the distance away from the camera, they light is on the front of her but it also hits some of the objects hanging from the ceiling.

At Hamptonne I took many photos which I later edited using Adobe Lightroom Classic. I started off by uploading my photos and organised them by using the ‘p’ and ‘x’ keys in order to choose the photos I liked and ignore those I didn’t.

I then begun briefly editing some of my favourite photos and highlighted them in yellow so they’d be easier to spot in the mix of photos before going back through and rating my brief edits with the number keys so I’d know which one’s to properly edit later on.

On photoshop I wanted to experiment with creating a gif on photoshop, with the images of the still life objects and other various ones which I took at Hamptonne so that there is a variation of photos.

Here are the instructions of what I followed so that I could create it:

1. Create layer for each image
2. Window > timeline
3. Select > Create Frame Animation
4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers
5. Timeline > select Forever
6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720 x 720 pixels

My photos that I will use

For my 3 photos that I will use, I will choose them from my photos which I had chosen to be my most successful on Adobe Lightroom from Hamptonne and Still life objects.

Editing –

I really like the way all 3 of these images have turned put as the lighting, which was over exposed due to time of day from the sunlight, has been controlled nicely which shows them to appear more detailed and clearer which I wanted to do so that they would be able to work well within the gif.

My gif

Here is the gif I made in Adobe Photoshop, I really enjoyed making it because it is able to show all of the different aspects/places which we saw at Hamptonne. It is a really unique way of revealing Hamptonnes heritage as the gif creates a story which shows the historical figures carrying out their daily activities, the lady who would look after her house in a portrait to represent her connection to the house which is linked through the picture of the interior. I also think that all of the photos compositions, filters, lighting, etc work well together as they create natural, warm tones from the sunlight which create a calm and comforting atmosphere, helping to enhance the story which the gif is creating to the viewer.

There was a range of objects which were found at Hamptonne, such as horse riding objects, shoes, clothes etc and it was really interesting seeing how well most of them have been kept. For these edits I also experimented with using Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom to see which photos I preferred.

Photoshop –

Adobe Lightroom –

Due to the time of day when we were taking photos of Hamptonne, the sunlight was quite bright which meant that a lot of my photos which were taken outside were over exposed due to the brightness of the sun, meaning the exteriors of the houses would be lost within the photos. Below, I have chosen 2 photos to edit on Adobe Lightroom which I think are quite cleverly taken as they show Hamptonnes exterior and historical figures who were there.

While at Hamptonne, there were various interiors which I took photos of which included various objects, giving it a level of uniqueness and individuality. Below, I have chosen two photos which I think were my most successful to edit and compare filters with. One edit I did on photoshop, whereas the other was done on Adobe Lightroom to experiment with which one I liked more.

Photoshop –

Adobe Lightroom –