The idea for this article came to me when I was watching the Sky Arts programme, Portrait Artist of the Year. I’ve watched every series. It’s a family favourite. Three celebrities are painted by three artists each. So a total of nine artists feature in every episode. Inevitably, a wide number of approaches are adopted. Pencil, paint, pen, charcoal, ink and collage have all featured. The celebrity sits for four hours and at the end of the programme a winner is chosen by three judges, a painter, a critic and a curator. The sitter choose’s their favourite portrait, to take home. That’s the format, but not what I want to talk about.

Despite these various approaches, the majority of the artists share one part of their creative process. Before they begin, they use phones, iPads and cameras to photograph the sitter. These they then use as the basis for their portraits. As a viewer we get to see these photographs and on the whole they are very good. These are not professional photographers, but their sophisticated understanding of composition and light is obvious in the images they capture, as a basis for what they consider to be a ‘true’ portrait. I have never seen a photographer on the programme use the medium to create a portrait, but I have seen photographers on there use paint. I wonder why?

If, as I am continually being told, photography is ‘art’ and photographers are ‘artists’, why can’t the artist of the year be a photographer?

The answer is that the programme clearly shows art as being interpretation, rather than representation, and this is a problem for photography. The photographic portrait can only be an accurate representation of the person in front of the camera. That is the main function of photography and that should be okay. The photographer can use lighting, props, locations, composition and process to bring a sense of control and themselves to an image. They can use post-production to manipulate the image. All of this is available to a photographer, but none of them offer the possibility of interpretation that the artists on the programme have at their fingertips.

Some of the artist competitors choose to faithfully recreate the photographs they have made, usually in ink or graphite, but the majority do not. Replication is not their intention.

As a portrait photographer for the last twenty-five years, I can confirm without equivocation, that my intention is replication. Creative replication of the place and the person I am photographing. I have never seen my role as one as an interpreter. Making images that show the person looking unlike the person they were when we met, based on how I feel about them. The photographic portrait is a record, a piece of evidence, whereas the artist’s portrait is a response. An artist’s drawing can, and has been used by the police to apprehend a criminal, but it will never be used in court in the way a photograph would be. It cannot be relied upon.

For the artist the photographic portrait is not enough. For the photographer it is. Two processes by which to capture the essence of a person, both with different intentions. Both are as valid as each other. I think I’ll call that a score draw.

Dr.Grant Scott
After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Scott began to work as a photographer for a number of advertising and editorial clients in 2000. Alongside his photographic career Scott has art directed numerous advertising campaigns, worked as a creative director at Sotheby’s, art directed foto8magazine, founded his own photographic gallery, edited Professional Photographer magazine and launched his own title for photographers and filmmakers Hungry Eye. He founded the United Nations of Photography in 2012, and is now a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, and a BBC Radio contributor. Scott is the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained(Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019), and What Does Photography Mean To You? (Bluecoat Press 2020). His photography has been published in At Home With The Makers of Style(Thames & Hudson 2006) and Crash Happy: A Night at The Bangers(Cafe Royal Books 2012). His film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay was premiered in 2018.

© Grant Scott 2026