POrtraiture

Portraitist as Subject
Origins and Purposes
Art and Science
Portraits
Reflections and Reviews
Portraiture is a method of social science inquiry distinctive in its blending of art and science, capturing the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has pioneered this method using it to document the culture of institutions, the life stories of individuals, stages of human development, essential relationships, processes, and concepts.

The seminal text The Art and Science of Portraiture illuminates the origins, purposes, and features of this method, placing it within the larger discourse on social science inquiry and mapping it onto the broader terrain of qualitative research. It delineates the processes, methods, and strategies of research design, data collection, and analysis, and underscores the balance of structure and improvisation as well as order and creativity. This landmark contribution to the field of research methodology is an indispensable resource for the social scientist and provides general readers with new and illuminating ways of viewing the world.
Reviews
  • Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum & Instruction
"Rich  in insight and gracefully written… The authors do a masterful job here of clarifying the dimensions of this dynamic layered research process. They make a convincing case for portraiture as a useful tool for exploring the complexity and aesthetic of experience, particulary educational experience. Most important, this volume advances portraiture as a generative research process that produces documents of both ‘inquiry AND intervention."
  • American Journal of Education
""The writing is beautiful, the ideas persuasive, and the picture it paints of the process of careful observation is one that every writer should read. . . . A rich and wonderful book."
  • Maxine Greene, William F. Russell, Professor Emerita in the Foundations of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University  
​""Unique in this text is the serious and informed concern for aesthetic qualities of each presentation, a concern that allows for exploration of contexts and a crossing of the gulfs between art and empiricism. Breaking through old either/ors, the authors invite us to see differently, to hear differently, and?in some fascinating manner?to understand."
  • Harvard Educational Review
"The Art and Science of Portraiture is an immensely important resource for the researcher interested in portraiture specifically and qualitative methodology more generally. While it is filled with practical information on strategies and techniques, as well as the history and origins of portraiture, it also holds a unique place among books on methodology in that it is actually a pleasure to read."
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