Portraits: Famous Photographers Argue and Agree

Thomas Broening: I think for a portrait to be great it needs to say more about that maker of the image than the subject. Avedon said that all portraits were accurate and none of them were the truth. They are all in a sense a postulation or an argument. Every-time a photographer points the camera a another person he is making a judgement. The grander the judgement the greater the lie.

Bruce Haley: One of my favorite examples of portraiture would have to be Edouard Boubat's stunning Lella, Bretagne, 1947... here we are presented with a real person, one who has been captured in two dimensions yet leaps off of the paper and right into our world, a living, breathing woman... she is both unique and intimate (we know this woman), yet at the same time she is iconic and archetypal and timeless... she is strong, she is determined, she is a modern-day Jeanne d’Arc heading into battle - and yet she is vulnerable, emotional... she is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, and it is achingly apparent that she is to Boubat as Jane Morris was to Rossetti...

Timothy Archibald: Trying to really pinpoint what makes a great portrait is almost like trying to figure out why it feels good when someone smiles at you or why it is disturbing when someone yells at you. There are these rules, this structure, and then there is this human intangible element that is the wild card. Everyone seems to know how to play by the rules and follow the structure, but as far as the intangible goes, this third element, that’s where it all falls apart or comes together, it allows the portrait to sink or swim or really transcend.

I spent the night reading this wonderful blog from Conscientitous