What are environmental portraits?

An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and it illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings.

August Sander

A famous photographer that does a lot of environmental portraits is August Sander, he made a project called “The Face of our People” then producing a volume of portraits titled “The Face of Our Time” in 1929. 

August sander took lots of inspiration from Bernd and Hilla Becher, using their idea of Typologies in his portraiture work. Each image was taken in a similar was, with the subject standing “stoically”. He documented German society in between the two World Wars, he wanted to make a record of social types, classes and the relationships between them and discovered that the collection was more powerful than just the images by themselves. This collection was so powerful that the Nazis actually destroyed the images and banned the book.