How ideas spring into life is a desperately difficult question. They can come unbidden or they can arrive painfully slowly after much cogitation and wide research. Research teaches us that we were not the first to pick up a camera and that for some subjects many great artists were there before us and central genres like the portrait have engaged the mightiest of talents.

This said, making portraits “in the style of” teaches so much that is valuable about what our great forbears knew about light and the human soul.

Below is the work of Matthew Sibson and his researches for the Unit One section of GCSE Photography. What we see here is thoroughgoing historical and photographic research much of it undertaken on the streets of great cities