Application
Portraiture is a portrait picture of someone or something. Normally more of a person than an item. When people started getting portrait pictures they had to be rich and have power, but when it came to the picture being taken it was the photographer that had the power to take the picture whenever he felt right. The People being photographed would normally get it of themselves, with their family or with their friends.
As you can see in the left side of this picture of a Pope, the Pope is sitting high in his chair wearing all his ropes, his hat and on his hand is a ring which could also symbolise power. In the right of the picture, Francis Bacon has painted an abstract of the orignal which shows a different side of the Pope, which he might be portraide as a Crazy not very nice man.
Contexts
Portraiture pictures can be seen in every day use, these can be seen in Books, people have created books with all their photographs in there so that they can be seen by who is interested, Year books, which normally have a picture of each class mate or a whole class or school photo, ID cards, which can be used to show someone who you are if there are age limits or if you need to know or want to find out who they are, stamps and money which has a portrait of the queen on them and art gallery's which has many portraits of people in them.
Techniques
Many photographers don't take the picture straight away. Like if the person that is being photographed is posing at the time they wait until they are relaxed and not expecting the picture to be taken. They liked them having a natural expression.
This is a picture by Walker Evans, which was a picture taken in the depression, as you can see the woman in the picture does not look happy about the picture being taken.
