Political portraits — 04

Portraits for the office, not just the campaign.

Office-holders, ministry pages, institutional registers and anything that will sit next to a coat of arms. The neutral register, shot to a written spec between cycles — and archived, so the person who replaces them in three years still matches the wall.

Institutional mid register Written spec archived Between cycles

Brief this service All political portrait services

Institutional portraiture has a different failure mode to campaign work. Nobody notices a good one; everybody notices the wall where four ministers were photographed by four people in four different rooms. The register is deliberately quiet — controlled grey with a soft falloff, minimal styling, and lighting chosen to age slowly rather than to look current. The work happens between cycles, at the pace that suits an institution rather than a campaign deadline. What makes it hold together over years is not the session but the archive: the written spec is kept with your file, so a successor photographed years later is shot against the same measurements and drops into the sequence without a reshoot of everyone else.

Institutional mid

Typical group

1–19 people

Built to still match in four years.

The institutional register

Controlled mid-grey with a soft falloff — the look that sits beside a coat of arms without competing with it, and the one that ages the slowest.

Consistency across a wall

Ministers, directors, board members and department heads photographed against one spec, so the corridor reads as one decision rather than a decade of them.

Formal and working variants

The formal frame for the register and a slightly warmer working frame for the website, from the same session — institutions need both and rarely budget for two visits.

Ballot-neutral styling

No campaign styling, no party colour in the frame, nothing that dates the portrait to one election. It has to still be usable after a change of government.

Archive with the spec

The measured spec is stored with the file so a successor is photographed against the same numbers years later, not against somebody’s memory of them.

Register-ready formats

The formats institutional systems actually ask for — 3:4 for registers and print listings, 1:1 for directory pages, 16:9 for broadcast and screens.

The spec outlives the session.

The smart layer

The reason institutional walls stop matching is almost never the photographer. It is that nobody wrote down what was done, so three years later the next session starts from scratch.

A measured spec sheet, stored
Light height and distance, modifier, power, lens, subject distance, background and exposure — recorded as numbers, kept with your file, and handed to you as well.
Reference-frame comparison
A new session is checked against the original reference frame before anyone leaves, so a drift in exposure or background density is caught on the day rather than on the wall.
One archive, one convention
Portraits filed against your own register structure and naming, so your own systems can find a face without a request to us.

How it runs.

Step 01

Register review

We look at what already exists on the wall or in the system, and agree whether the new work matches it or resets it. Both are valid; picking accidentally is not.

Step 02

Session

Studio or on site at the institution. Formal and working variants from one visit, against the agreed measured spec.

Step 03

Archive & hand-over

Files delivered to your register convention, the measured spec handed over, and the archive retained on your instruction so successors can be matched later.

Per office-holder

Formal register portrait
Warmer working variant from the same session
Register formats: 3:4, 1:1, 16:9
Print and web sets, correctly named

Across the institution

One register standard for every portrait
The measured spec sheet, handed to you
Reference frame kept for future matching
Filed to your own register convention

Continuity

Archive retained on your instruction
Successors matched to the original spec
Re-licence and archive from €300 per year
Purge on request, confirmed in writing

Disclosure

Every frame on this page is our own studio reference work, photographed to demonstrate the standard. No client campaign material appears here, or anywhere else on this site.

Before you brief.

Can you match portraits taken by somebody else?

Usually, within limits. We can measure an existing frame and reproduce its register closely — background density, key direction, crop and colour. What we cannot do is reproduce a lens and body we do not have, so an exact match is not something we will promise before seeing the reference.

Do you photograph at the institution or in the studio?

Either. A mobile station needs roughly three by four metres and a power socket, which most institutions can find. On-site work is priced from €450 per day on top of the per-person rate.

Is this covered by the same confidentiality terms?

Yes. Separate storage, an NDA before the first session, no portfolio use, and an agreed purge date. Institutional work is treated exactly as political work is.

The rest of the service.

Eight ways into the same standard. Most engagements combine two or three.

Campaign portraits

We photograph two or three people first and lock the look with you before anybody else is scheduled. It becomes the written spec for the entire programme.

Candidate headshot days

Your list becomes a schedule with a named slot per person, so nobody loses a working day waiting for a turn that never comes.

AI delivery engine

The detector returns a face box and landmarks; each crop is computed from the eye line at a face-to-frame ratio set per output shape, so every format frames the head consistently.

See all eight

Institutional portraits from €280 per person, falling with headcount.

€280 at 1–19 people, €220 at 20–59. Minimum engagement €1,400. Archive and re-licence from €300 per year.

See the full rate card

Match the wall, or reset it.

Tell us how many office-holders and whether there is an existing register to match. We will reply within one business day.

Brief this service Political portraits