ABSTRACT
Introduction Portrait photo graphy is usually considered to be the taking of photo graphs primar ily of indi vidu als who are posing for the photo grapher (although this is not always the case, as we shall see later). Drawn from the idea of painted portraits, portrait photo graphy was not initially possible in the early days of photo graphy, where photo graphic expos ures required individu als to sit perfectly still for several minutes (Ford 2005). As tech no logy has improved and progressed, photo graphic portraits, espe cially those taken in studios, have continued to be very popular with indi vidu als. Scholars have grappled with the implic a tions of posed photo graphs. Kesting (2014), for example, considers how migra tion in South Africa is framed and how migrants are made visible through mundane pass port photographs as well as more artistic projects, whilst Rose (2012) looks at more
informal portraits in the guise of family snap shots and what she calls the visual economy of distri bu tion of images through the mass media. Other schol ars make use of portraits taken by them selves in their research, as Harper, Knowles and Leonard (2005) did with British migrants in Hong Kong, or Pinney (1997), who reflects on the contra dic tions between his own prac tice of creat ing posed photo graphs in India and the differ ent gazes asso ci ated with the desires of how his subjects wanted to be repres en ted.
