Genre portrait in photography: features

2025 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2025-01-05 09:21

Portrait as a genre of fine art and sculpture has been known since time immemorial. The most interesting thing is that there is also a genre portrait as a kind of genre itself. It is about her that we will talk in this material, focusing on photography, since this division appeared already at the junction of fine art and, in fact, photography.

Definition

In fact, the line between just a portrait and its genre variety is rather arbitrary. Just the image of a person without any events in the background can be safely attributed to the portrait genre as a whole. But the appearance in the background of details or other people who have any, at least a small, relation to what is happening in the foreground, can already be called a genre portrait. Therefore, obviously, many works that are obviously representatives of portrait art can just as easily be attributed to its genre variety. Thus, the features of a genre portrait are the correlation of a character or several in the foreground with the environment.

Photo

The genre portrait in photography is defined in the same way. If the background or background has no history associated with the foreground,on which a person or several is located, then, obviously, this is just a portrait. However, any, the most insignificant connection, or even just a hint of it, automatically transfers the photo to the category of a genre portrait, of course, provided that one or more people are observed in the foreground.

A genre portrait, just like genre painting, is like a kind of mirror in which people see themselves, comprehending who they really are. The origins of the concept go back to the depiction of scenes of everyday life, that is, almost to the times of rock paintings. Subsequently, such art was manifested in the visual representation of holidays and other events, incidents, etc. All these are examples of classical genre painting. With the advent of photography, and then its manifestation as a separate art among its elegant forms, the concept migrated to it, forming its own laws here. It is these canons that photographers who shoot genre portraits now follow.

The most important law when creating such pictures was the requirement to have a plot. The topics are often the events of everyday life, random scenes from the context of everyday life, the social and domestic environment of people. Thus, the main difference between a portrait and its genre variety can be called the absence of a process, action or a hint of it.

Shooting

When shooting a genre portrait, you should be careful to divert attention from the character to the details of the environment, as this can be easily overdone. From oneon the one hand, the environment should complement the image of the model, on the other hand, it should not be so much that attention is distracted. It is precisely this difficulty that a photographer who has started to take up a genre portrait will face.

Conclusion

Summing up, we note that the line between portrait and genre shooting is very thin and often just elusive. However, in the latter one can always catch a hint of action, a plot that can be veiled, but cannot be absent. This is what makes the genre portrait so interesting, pushing the boundaries of fine arts to reflect the life of a person, giving the connoisseur the opportunity to see himself, to consider his life from a new, perhaps completely unusual angle. To philosophize together with the creator of the image and leave the exhibition a little different. Understand yourself better, which means getting a couple more steps closer to perfection, which, apparently, is what art exists for.