Portraiture was a word reserved for the privileged. Until cameras entered the market.
Compared to oil painting and other art media, photography is fast, efficient and without error. If you made a tiny mistake on a year-long oil paint project, good luck to you!
But this does not mean photographic portraiture is simply better. And for many reasons, I actually believe it is less effective to its oil-painted counterpart, at least in terms of its presentation.
Photographers express their ideas through lighting, included elements, composition, and in case there is a subject, the poses, and facial expressions. In a controlled environment, everything is simple. You just put everything together, try a couple of times and click a button.
But you cannot do that with nature, or a crowded local marketplace.
Everything is constantly moving and changing, and thus you have little say in what actually goes into your frame.
When you have a model, you also need to carefully combine your own artistic ideas with the model’s self-expression.
You might want a view at a certain height or angle, but you can only capture those shots when you, say, stand on top of the traffic light.
But these could hardly be problems for oil-painting. The scene is only limited by your skill and imagination. If you want to remove a character, then just don’t include it. If you want three leaves for a flower instead of two, so be it. You can move the viewpoint into the sky, under the sea, and into the ground and nothing but your imagination could stop you from doing so.
*photograph was taken in Vanderbilt University’s art studio.