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Styles
Like everything else in life, portraiture styles run in cycles. In part, they follow fashion and they have also developed, influenced both by changes in society and by different cultures.

Portrait photography is almost as old as photography itself and the earliest portraits involved daylight studios, where the light was controlled by blinds blocking out light coming in through skylights and windows. But the photographers couldn't control the daylight too much because they relied on the quantity of light as much as the quality and so their main problem must have been getting enough light to actually take the pictures.

Today, although cameras lenses and especially ISO speeds have improved to the point where daylight can be used in studios fairly easily, nearly all photographers prefer to use artificial lighting of one sort or another, simply because it's easier to control.

And back in the bad old days, cameras were very slow and cumbersome and lenses had small maxium apertures and were difficult to focus. Even more importantly, films were very slow (about ½ ISO) and because of this exposures took several minutes. Because of this the sitters had to be able to keep stock still and were 'helped' in this by sitting in special chairs fitted with neck supports!

The result of course was that every portrait was nothing more than a physical likeness; there was no room for creativity or to show the personality of the sitter.

Fast forward to the middle of the 20th century and nearly every family had their Brownie box camera but the results weren't always up to the standards people hoped for, so it became a tradition for the whole family to troop off to see their local high street professional once a year for a family portrait. It was best clothes and a new hairdo so, once again, the styles were formal, with carefully orchestrated poses and perfect symmetry, often photographed against ornate backgrounds with false and rather grand room settings.