The first looks like a straightforward portrait of Paul Anka (it had to be deadpan enough for television), but behind the cha-cha beat and ecstatic fans there's another story.

Producing a simple and straightforward, yet evocative and powerful, portrait is one of the most difficult things to do in photography.

Even straightforward portraits of the kind I've mentioned are tinged with ambiguity.

This exhibition includes many straightforward portraits, but without the polemical urgency that animated Ms. Sleigh's odalisques and the A.I.R. group portrait, they are less interesting.

Armet Francis's straightforward Jamaican portraits and Franklyn Rodgers's image of a young man wearing a fish as if it were a hat are more conventional in format.

Picasso's renderings of his lover Dora Maar range from an almost straightforward portrait to a monstrously misshapen infant-woman sucking stumpy fingers.

One classical painter, Eli Shamir, who concentrates on straightforward portraits and Israeli landscapes, said that he was effectively shunned by the art establishment.

"I struggle with it all the time, and a straightforward portrait would be a kind of anchor."

Onstage with the quartet were Tim Steele's "Lincoln Trilogy" paintings, one straightforward portrait and two with Lincoln in allegorical settings.

Her straightforward, full-length portraits of a punk and punkette in full regalia are her best efforts and are interesting as anthropological documents as well.