Contemporary Realist Portrait Photography

About

This approach prizes description over interpretation. Sitters usually face the camera in even light, backgrounds are plain or ordinary, and the photographer repeats one framing across a series so that the differences between people stand out. Its roots lie in August Sander's survey People of the 20th Century, begun in the 1920s, and in the typological rigour Bernd and Hilla Becher later passed to their students in Düsseldorf.

Rineke Dijkstra photographs people at thresholds, such as mothers shortly after giving birth or young army recruits, and lets their self-consciousness show. Jitka Hanzlová returned to the village of her childhood in the Czech countryside to photograph its inhabitants. Alessandra Sanguinetti has followed two cousins in rural Argentina from girlhood into adulthood. Bruce Gilden takes a harsher line, filling the frame with weathered faces in close-up flash. Jess T. Dugan makes slow, collaborative portraits that explore gender and identity.