Abstract
Portraiture is a creative qualitative approach to engaging in research of leaders and groups in action and in telling the stories of individuals in life. It was first employed to great effect in Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's 1983 AERA award-winning book, The Good High School. In an effort to expand and explain the application of portraiture as a method of scientific research, Lightfoot co- authored a second book with Jessica Hoffmann Davis entitled The Art and Science of Portraiture, released in 1997. This article critically examines the assumptions and methods of portraiture. It questions the authority of the portraitist in arbitrarily and unilaterally creating portraits, pointing out there is no external, independent referent for ascertaining the truth-telling capacity of the portraitist because the definition of truth is circular. Further more, the objective of portraiture to capture the "'essence" of the subject is implicitly a quest for a foundationaI and stable truth, which in turn requires the portraitist to become omniscient or else the resulting verbal canvas contains only a half or three-quarters truth. Portraiture represents an example of grand theory in the social sciences when such theories are on the decline. The article suggests that the problem with portraiture as a research method is to be found not in technique, but in its failure to interrogate what it conceals, i.e., the politics of vision.
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