Contemporary Portrait Photography

About

Since the 1970s photographers have pulled the portrait in several directions at once. Some work in series. Thomas Ruff enlarged plain, passport-style heads to poster size in the 1980s, and Rineke Dijkstra's Beach Portraits (1992–2002) show adolescents alone at the shoreline, caught between poise and awkwardness. Others stage the picture. Cindy Sherman has spent her career photographing herself in invented roles, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia paid men in Hollywood to pose for Hustlers (1990–92), titling each print with the sitter's name, age, home town and fee.

Intimacy is a third path. Nan Goldin photographed friends and lovers for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slideshow she developed from the late 1970s, and Peter Hujar made direct, unhurried portraits of downtown New York artists. Annie Leibovitz brought elaborate staging to celebrity magazine work. Carrie Mae Weems often places her own figure in the frame as a guide through history and domestic life.