This is one of the most intelligent books about a genre of photography I have seen. The author manages to say things almost about the broadest imaginable range of person-rendering that are concrete enough to be interesting and worth reading. He combines a certain amount of formal (structural) analysis with the expressive, psychological, pathological, and other nonconcrete aspects of images in a manner that allows one to understand what is behind some photographers' works that bore me to death: to wit, as one example, square format images with a fill-flashed figure of a prepubescent girl standing (vertical) in the exact center of the frame. One or two of these, and I find that trying to divine the photographer's "message" more than a pain, let alone a possible waste of time. Such images are statements about psychological issues using photography as a means of expression, but the viewer, without lots of explanation, is left to "read the photographer's mind," an activity at which my favorite math professor and I are pronouncedly not very good.
That I find a certain percentage of the exemplars tedious and boring is not a negative comment on this author's achievement. He makes sense of what a viewer should or can understand about images.
Unfortunately, so many works, and not just portraiture, put one's eye to sleep when seen in numbers. That this author explains so well what is behind the motivation or intentions of these images having been made is commendable, even delightful, but it still fails to remove such a need from many viewers to have written assistance in understanding some photographers' and artists' messages, if they are worth understanding at all.
This book makes an outstanding textbook. The exercises cannot fail to push one past any number of limits and open new visual horizons. Bravo.
It would be good to see such a book available for other genres of photography: landscape, street, and others.