Panel Portrait

This rather unusually shaped portrait of a studious young boy is described on the reverse as a “Panel Portrait” and is by the Blackpool photographer J Bamber of 69, Church Street. The only other reference I can find online to a “panel portrait” is by the same photographer and dates from the 1920s, so we can assume that Mr Bamber was experimenting with different shapes for his studio output in this period.  The name may have been derived from the panel paintings of the medieval and renaissance period, which would be long portraits painted on wooden panels. The style obviously never caught on and is out of keeping with the modern trend towards wide-angle landscape formats.