What is urban portraiture?

This is one of the most asked questions when I tell someone what I specialize in as a photographer - so let me explain:

Urban Portrait [ ???b?n ?p??tr?t ]

A portrait is a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders. Urban describes something as being in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city.

The combination of these two terms thus means a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, especially one depicting only the face or head and shoulders in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city.

Now - what people actually mean is: “How do You do Urban Portraiture”

I photograph mainly Actors, Musicians, Dancers and Influencers and help them integrate Product placements or create scenes to stand out in the crowd. In order to differ from the typical (if that even exists) Studio portrait I take them to a part of a city which acts as the backdrop to the photography.

This usually means that we take a 2-3 Hour walk through a city - passing by spots of interesting architecture - overlooked infrastructure or grimey graffiti. The sets could be a skatepark or a sidestreet, a car dumpt to a streetart site. At each location I aim to create 3 Subscenes and we move on as soon as we are happy with them. Throughout the shoot we change little details about the clothing such as adding Hats glasses scarfs ect.

The resulting Images are a portrait of the Person in questions as well as the city we wandered through. They represent the Journey as much as the person .

The beauty in this approach is, that although I scout the locations beforehand - it actively involves the imagination and creative ability of the Model to make the locations work as 3 scenes. This is a 1+1 = 3 Situation as the combined creativity leads to surprising and unusual results.

If you would like to, please take a look at my website www.hexagram.photography or Instagram @hexagramphotography