what is environmental photography?

The surroundings or background is a key element in environmental portraiture, and is used to convey further information about the person being photographed.

Some environmental portrait photographers, like August Sander, create typologies. A typology is commonly a single photo or a body of work that shares a high level of consistency, like ideas in mind or angles or framing. In environmental portraiture, when each photo is taken with a similar idea/meaning, it emphasises comparison and analysis between photos.

Influential environmental photographers.

August Sander (1876 – 1964)

“If we can create portraits of subjects
that are true, we thereby in effect
create a mirror of the times.”

-August Sander

August Sander was a German Portrait and documentary photographer. He began his decades-long project People of the Twentieth Century. Though Sander never completed this exceptionally ambitious project, it includes over 600 photographs divided into seven volumes and nearly 50 portfolios.1 The seven volumes Sander used as his organizing principles were The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People.

some typology i picked up on here is how all the people are looking at the camera and centered this shows how each person photographed all had an equal experience.

Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark (March 20, 1940 – May 25, 2015) was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes”

“she portrayed the street girls of Bombay (now Mumbai) in all their exoticism and ennui, as well as the often cramped and dirty spaces they were forced to work in. Her images were never vicarious or salacious, but always shot through with a sense of her own humanity.”

She returned to India to shoot travelling circuses,

-Another magazine