The Art and Science of Portraiture was published in 1997, as a joint project of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffman Davis, a professor and a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education with disciplinary backgrounds in sociology and the arts, respectively. In some ways it’s a work of its time—its emphasis on bridging “art and science” feels a bit old-fashioned and simplistic now. But in other ways it retains a kind of radical freshness. By the time the book was written, Lawrence-Lightfoot had been exploring the ideas and methods of portraiture for some 15 years, beginning with The Good High School (1983). She wanted to write in ways “that will seduce the readers into thinking more deeply about issues that concern them” (1997, p. 10), and to avoid the problem-centred gaze she saw in much mainstream academic work. Instead, she centred portraiture on what she called “the search for goodness.”
This is an ethical project: the work of coming to understand how others live meaningful lives on their terms. Lawrence-Lightfoot called it “portraiture” because she had in mind a kind of ethical reciprocity, whereby the person sitting for a portrait looks back at the portraitist with a gaze that demands recognition. The researcher, or “portraitist,” lets themselves be called to account: rather than depicting the social world or the individuals within it from a distance, they include themselves in it, registering the ways they bring their own subjectivity to the work. Portraiture seeks to record individual voices and perspectives within the context that gives means to them; it lets the reader see how people make sense of their social and cultural positioning and the possibilities of working for something better, and how the researcher is doing this as well through the work of portraiture itself.
To this methodology, Lawrence-Lightfoot’s co-author Jessica Hoffman Davis brought a deep interest in the processes of art-making. Alongside her colleague’s emphasis on “the aesthetic principles of composition and form, rhythm, sequence, and metaphor” (1997, p. 12), Davis contributed insights into art as practice, and into portraiture as a kind of thinking: “In portraiture, as in any work of art, the medium is an agent of discovery” (1997, p. 36). Her inclusion in the book of “gesture drawings” by children and adults – quick, impressionistic “portraits” of emotions such as Angry, Sad and Happy – helped draw out the importance of “creativity and improvisation” in portraiture (1997, p. xvii) and aligned the methodology more explicitly with arts-based traditions in educational research.
The move into eco-portraiture
Even though portraiture’s original formulation is so clearly centred on the voices and doings of humans, it is more open than many methodologies to listening to the more-than-human. For a start, it is deeply interested in alterity, or otherness—in the different ways people have of making meaning and seeking goodness. Transposing this to the natural world means taking an interest in how all the more-than-human beings in a particular place embody their own kinds of goodness (the goodness of being tree, squirrel, rock, stream) and also the kind of collective goodness that we recognize as a healthy ecosystem. But beyond this, portraiture is centrally concerned with voice—with the ways in which people not only live differently but express that difference in ways that invite, or demand, recognition and response. In the eco-school contexts that provided the initial impetus for ecoportraiture, we saw that children and teachers were being addressed by the more-than-human world in ways that contributed to what was being taught and learned.
The basic stance of the portraitist is what Lawrence-Lightfoot calls “empathetic regard.” In her human-centred research, this involves listening to stories and deepening relationships in the research setting, learning to recognize insistent themes that offer “coherence, purpose and definition” to people’s journeys (1997, p. 197). Building on this, then, the ecoportraitist pays attention to the stories of place as they are embodied by humans and more-than-humans alike, and to the unfolding of relationship across species divides. How do children and teachers come to listen more deeply to the voices of the natural world? What does the natural world make of the range of humans in its midst? How do learning and teaching happen when everything is a potential teacher? And what happens to the portraitist herself as she becomes part of this relational web?
Such questions suggest that ecoportraiture is not, or at least not necessarily, simply portraiture that attends more deliberately to “the ecological context.” The viewpoint of the portraitist may shift so that the voices of the more-than-human are brought to the fore and their “search for goodness” made central to the research. At the least, the quest to extend portraiture beyond merely human concerns invites a substantial shift in perspective, a different quality of gaze, an approach to relationship that is more Earthly and humble than The Art and Science of Portraiture might suggest.