Portrait

A portrait is a depiction of one particular person, and a self-portrait is an artist's portrait of themselves. The tradition reaches back at least to ancient Egypt, where portraits were being made in quantity some 5,000 years ago. Until photography arrived, a painted, carved, or drawn portrait was the sole means of preserving how someone looked, yet portraits have rarely been unflattering. Among leading modern artists, commissioned portraits grew steadily rarer, and many painted friends and lovers however they liked; at the same time photography became the main medium of traditional portraiture and made affordable what had once been a costly luxury. Since the 1990s artists have also made living portraits on video, and portrait painting continues to flourish. A portrait need not be realistic: a Japanese encyclopedia entry (Maypedia, via Kotobank) accepts idealized or caricatured likenesses as portraits so long as a resemblance to the person's appearance remains. Taipei Art Week's page for Joy and Shelter (喜悅與棲所), a group exhibition of contemporary Czech photography at MAISON ACME, says that in the works shown there the portrait becomes a way of looking at identity, intimacy, and distance.

Look at the face, then at what surrounds it: clothing, pose, setting. Does the picture seem to flatter its sitter?