Portraits from all periods and in every style are among the most important collecting areas of the Photographic Collection in Essen. This volume gives a cross-section of this significant collection. It shows the enormous variety of ways in which people can be brought into the picture and photographed: conventional and experimental, as unity and as fragment, visibly staged and seemingly fleeting, as artifice and creature, type and individual, as façade and with their whole soul. The volume contains photographs by Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Imogen Cunningham, Rineke Dijkstra and many others.