PHOTOGRAPHY: Nurnberg's Old-School Guide to Lighting Portraits

If you’re looking for a book on portrait lighting there are plenty to chose from. But before you load up your Amazon shopping cart with recent releases you may want to consider an oldie-but-goodie: Walter Nurnberg’s Lighting for Portraiture.

First published in 1948, Lighting for Portraiture won’t show you how to master the latest studio gear or perform miracles with your speedlights, but it will give you a solid understanding of basic portrait lighting concepts along with a slew of recipes that are as applicable today as they were back when spot, flood or bare bulb, were the photographer’s only options.

A follower of the Neue Sachlichkeit who studied at the Bauhaus, Nurnberg (1907-1991) immigrated to London from his native Berlin in the early 1930s. He launched an advertising studio and quickly found success in commercial photography, however, following WWII he turned his efforts to photographing Britain’s resurgent industries and today he is widely regarded as a master of industrial photography.

Nurnberg’s industrial photographsNurnberg also was a committed teacher and a prolific writer, and Lighting for Portraiture is just one of the books he authored for London’s Focal Press from the late 40s until his retirement in the early 70s. Nurnberg’s best-known book is Lighting for Photography: means and methods, which was in print as recently as 2003, but Lighting for Portraiture also warrants description as a classic.

Lighting for Portraiture contains much useful information, especially if you’re new to portrait photography or have an interest in styles of portraiture from the 40s through 60s. The book’s best feature, however, and a big reason why it is worth seeking out today, is Nurnberg’s signature lighting diagrams, which show very precisely how subject, lights and camera need to be positioned in order to achieve specific effects. Nurnberg’s diagrams actually comprise two interrelated diagrams displayed side-by-side. The first of these shows how to position lights and other gear laterally in relation to the subject; the second shows the proper elevation of lights relative to the subject’s eyes. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the key Nurnberg provides in his introduction you’ll quickly see the genius of his approach.

Nurnberg’s industrial photographsNurnberg uses the diagrams to illustrate “principal effects” like center lighting, cross lighting, back lighting, and rim lighting and how each of these changes with even minor adjustments to a light’s or the subject’s position. In the book’s third section, he pairs the diagrams with example photos and detailed commentary to present 61 recipes—he calls them “schemes”—for lighting full-face, partial-face and profile portraits. Recipes range from simple one-light set-ups to more complicated combinations of 3, 4, or even more lights. Nurnberg’s comments offer thoughts on appropriate applications, possible modifications, and other tips and tricks.

Lighting for Portraiture does have a few shortcomings: for example, I’m not sure today’s readers will agree with the blurb on the jacket of my 1969 edition that Nurnberg has a special “economy with words” (in fact, his language tends towards a quaintly anachronistic verbosity); some of the terms he employs have long since passed out of usage; and not all of the book’s lighting recipes have accompanying example photos, but these are barely worth noting considering the book’s strengths. Few of the portrait “how-to” books I’ve examined lately combine as in-depth a look at lighting fundamentals with such a large number of recipes, and fewer still feature lighting diagrams as info-rich as Nurnburg’s, and that’s why Lighting for Portraiture remains a valuable resource even though we’re fast approaching the 40th anniversary of its last revision.