THE BACKGROUND IN environmental portraiture, as in so many other fields of photography, is the make or break element and you could even go so far as to say that it is the most important.

Making the environment work with the picture, rather than against it, is a crucial element of this type of photography and the photographer needs to make all the elements in the frame work for the picture, not against it.

Studios are easy places to work in and every element of the image is in the photographer’s control. Not so with location photography. Here everything has been set in place and the only thing you can change is your point of view.

The places where people live and work are often filled to the brim with the objects that make up their daily lives. However, less is always more and a huge pitfall is for the surroundings to dominate the subject. What you need to do is to include just enough in the frame to tell us a bit about the person we are looking at while not allowing them to be overshadowed.

How much is enough?

Think of a picture of a man in a clean white shirt, late thirties, neat haircut, friendly smile. This man could be anyone. He could be an office worker or a bank clerk. Now put a stethoscope around his neck. Suddenly you are looking at a doctor. Often it is not about the quantity of visual clues you include in the picture, but rather about their symbolic strength.

Another example: take the same man, but remove the stethoscope. Now put an expensive silver pen in his breast pocket. Suddenly we don’t know what he does anymore, but we are led to believe that he is important, focused and perhaps very well organized.

Now remove the white shirt and the pen. Dress him in a loud Hawaiian shirt. Now he is on holiday, fairly relaxed and perhaps a little happy-go-lucky.

The point is that we can make very small changes to a photograph or the surroundings in which a person is shot and thereby tell the viewer a very different story.

Picture Stories and Environmental Portraits

If a picture tells a thousand words, then the simple picture story could fill a novel.

Picture stories, where a number of images are displayed together in a group, are often overlooked and the tendency is to place the burden of communication firmly on the shoulders of a single image. This may be a big mistake. The human personality is often a rich tapestry of facets in equilibrium and facets in flux and for a true likeness of the person you are photographing you may very well need more than one photograph.

A good picture story is so much more than the sum of its parts. Individual images may be able to communicate a message, but a group of images can build a dialogue and a narrative that interacts with the viewer in a way that is simply not possible to do in a single image.

Especially in environmental portraits, where the goal is to convey more about the subject than simply what they look like, the picture story is a powerful tool.

How many pictures do you need to tell a story?

The bare minimum seems to be three, though I personally like using four. It is merely a matter of preference and will depend on the subject you are photographing and the message you want to send.

Picture stories open the doors to a wealth of possibilities. First, it allows you to follow the subject over time. You may be able to capture a variety of sides to the person’s character by showing him at different times. Take our doctor from the previous example, with all the healing qualities and trust that the photograph of his clean features and his stethoscope conveys. Now add a second picture with that same doctor taking part in sports hunting at the weekend, and all of a sudden the dynamic of the narrative created by the photographs changes completely.