For ages, when you felt important enough to be portrayed, you had to commission a painter to paint your mug. A costly and time-consuming process, that automatically generated careful consideration before even taking the step of contacting painters and perhaps looking at some portfolios of sketches. And in the process, during the many sittings it might take to finish the product, you too would have loads of time to consider the painter’s first outlines and perhaps adjust as you went along. Just like the painter would. 

The photographic portrait was different from the get-go. Even in the early days, when photography was still a relatively “slow” medium with exposure times running in the minutes, it produced results considerably faster than painting and drawing did before. In the decades following the “birth” of photography at the end of the 1830s, photography as a medium just got faster and faster. Enthusiasts such as Fox Talbot spent enormous amounts of time experimenting, adjusting and perfecting chemical compositions used to capture the “light images”, and perhaps more importantly and for a long time the greatest struggle, also retaining or fixing these.  

Over time, photography evolved from being a medium of the happy few elitists to a medium of the masses. This did not happen overnight, but rather over decades. In the many histories of photography that have been composed to this day, it is often recited that the turning point was when George Eastman’s Kodak found a way to produce a small, easy-to-operate camera that could basically be operated by anyone. In addition, Kodak took the labouring process of developing the film and printing the images in the darkroom out of the customer’s hands, steps for which many different chemicals and appliances were needed, as well as specific knowledge. “You press the button, we do the rest.” The consumer handed in their camera at their local store with a full film roll still in it, and in some time received in return their camera loaded with fresh film and a folder with prints of their previous roll. 

Another step in photography’s democratization has most definitely been the inauguration of the digital age. In the first five to ten years, digital photography might have sooner been a step back rather than forwards in relation to availability to all. As with all brand-new techniques, the first specimens of digital cameras were extremely expensive, making it available only to wealthy early adopters. However, as we all know, development in the digital era has been crazy fast, resulting in what is now an everyday practice that almost everyone walks around with a digital camera in his pocket that is over a thousand times better than those first, super expensive models.  

Literally, anyone can take a photograph anywhere. This practice has reduced the “commissioning” of a portrait to a simple question: “Hey, take my photo, will you?”, which can be answered with a few simple “swipes” and clicks. In a heartbeat, one can produce a portrait, crop it, adjust the lighting and other edits, and send it to the person who “commissioned” it. The whole process has become so effortless, that anyone can do it and as a result, professional photographers struggle to validate their practice and pricing. They are priced out of the market by the fact that everyone thinks they are, or at least know what it entails to be, a photographer. A modern-day example of “my three-year-old could do that”, as was already the critique in the days of Modern art in the 19^th century. 

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