What is environmental portraiture?
Environmental portraiture is a photographic style that captures subjects within their natural surroundings, often blending the person’s environment with their identity. Unlike traditional studio portraits, which focus primarily on the subject, environmental portraits reveal more about a person’s lifestyle, personality, and mood, depending on the location, camera angles, what’s in the frame, and what they are doing.
August Sander and Typologies
One of the first photographic typological studies was by the German photographer August Sander, whose project ‘People of the 20th Century’ produced volumes of portraits entitled ‘The Face of Our Time’ in 1929. Sander categorised his portraits according to their profession and social class.
August Sander
August Sander was a German photographer whose work documented the society he lived in. Lauded as one the most-important portrait photographers of the early 20th century, Sander focused his gaze on bricklayers, farmers, bakers, and other members of the community.
“Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography,” he once declared. “Let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age.”
Born in Herdorf, Germany on November 17, 1876, Sander learned photography during his military service in the city of Trier. By 1910, he had moved to a suburb of Cologne, spending his days biking along the roads to find people to photograph. By the time the Nazi regime rose to power in the 1930s, Sander was considered an authority on photography and recognized for his book Face of Our Time (1929)
Image Analysis
Technical: Natural lighting (clouded daylight), shallow depth of field
Visual: Warm b&w, a mostly dark image – highlights on the subjects
Contextual: Working class men – late 19th and early 20th century
Conceptual: Typologies – multiple variants of the same thing – in terms of August Sander it’s his portraits
Typologies
What are Typologies?
Typology is the study of various traits and types, or the systematic classification of the types of something according to their common characteristics.
A photographic typology is a single photograph or more commonly a body of photographic work, that shares a high level of consistency. This consistency is usually found within the subjects, environment, photographic process, and presentation or direction of the subject.
Photoshoot
