Portrait themes

Learning Challenges:

• To understand portraiture by looking at different themes.
• To show your understanding by visually presenting these ideas in your books.

Question: What does "identity" mean?
In psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, identity is the conception, qualities, beliefs, and expressions that make a person or group different from others.



Question: What does "performance" mean?
In everyday interactions, the body serves as a critical site of identity performance. In conveying who we are to other people, we use our bodies to project information about ourselves. This is done through movement, clothes, speech, and facial expressions. What we put forward is our best effort at what we want to say about who we are. Yet while we intend to convey one impression, our performance is not always interpreted as we might expect.

 

Question: How can you "visualise" religion?
Religion is a cultural system of behaviours and practices, mythologies, world views, sacred texts, holy places, ethics, and societal organisation that relate humanity to what an anthropologist has called "an order of existence".

Religion can be visualised through clothes, body language, location, activity, text, colour.

 

Question: How can you "visualise" culture?

A culture is a way of life of a group of people; the behaviours, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.

Culture can be visualised though activity, ritual, groups of people, colour, fashion, clothes, ceremony, activity.