Le Portrait

In Portraits people from every walk of life and every level of society pause before the lenses of photography's pioneers, and the results account for some of the most familiar and most memorable images in the history of photography. Cecil Beaton's portrait of Marlon Brando, Gisèle Freund's Virginia Woolf, Brassaï's Picasso and Bachrach's Katharine Hepburn — these glittering portraits pair artist and subject of equal renown. Yet in many cases an unidentified portrait, such as Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother', captures precisely the look or feel of a particular time or society. There are also the fascinating examples of early photographic portraiture: Napoleon Sarony's 1882 photograph of Oscar Wilde, or Mathew Brady's portrait of General Robert E. Lee taken just after the Civil War.

Colin Ford, formerly keeper of film and photography at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and first keeper of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, contributes an authoritative introduction. From Julia Margaret Cameron to Irving Penn, from Nadar to Karsh, from Lartigue to Diane Arbus, Portraits is a striking and illuminating record of the people and societies it portrays.