The Difference Between a Headshot and an Executive Portrait

Most companies photograph their leadership the same way they photograph everyone else: a headshot, clean background, shoulders up, smile. That’s correct for the team page. It’s the wrong image for almost everything else a CEO, founder, managing partner, or head of school gets photographed for.

I photograph executives and leadership teams in Boston and New York City for press, board materials, speaking engagements, annual reports, and websites. Here’s when a headshot is enough and when it isn’t.

A headshot identifies. A portrait says something.

A headshot’s job is to show what a person looks like, consistently with everyone else on the page. It’s a passport photo with better lighting. That’s not a criticism. It’s a specific tool for a specific job, and it should be boring in the right way.

An executive portrait’s job is different. It’s the image that goes with the press release, the profile in the Boston Business Journal, the conference program, the announcement of the new managing partner. It runs alone, not in a grid, so consistency with colleagues doesn’t matter. What matters is whether the image says something true about the person and the organization.

If the same headshot is doing both jobs, the press image looks like a LinkedIn profile, because it is one.

What most executive photography gets wrong

There’s a genre look: arms crossed, slight lean, glass office in the background, faint smile that means “confident but approachable.” Every leadership page in financial services looks like this. So does every law firm partner page in Manhattan. It signals “executive” the way a stock photo signals “meeting,” and it’s just as forgettable.

The other failure is the opposite: an over-produced portrait with dramatic lighting that looks like a magazine cover for a magazine that doesn’t exist. Founders get talked into this. It ages badly.

What a good executive portrait looks like

It’s made in a real place that means something. The CEO of a biotech in Kendall Square photographed in the lab, not in front of a gray backdrop. The head of a school in a hallway with student work on the walls. A managing partner in the office she actually uses, with the mess left in.

It’s lit by the room, or as close to it as possible. Natural light and a small amount of fill reads as a photograph of a person. Three strobes reads as a photo shoot, and viewers subtract credibility accordingly.

It has an expression the person actually makes. This takes time. The first five minutes of any executive portrait session produce the “confident but approachable” face, because that’s what the person has been told to do. The real image comes after that, usually while they’re talking about something they care about. A portrait session should be forty-five minutes, not ten.

Planning executive portraits

Photograph leadership separately from the company headshot day. The headshot day is a production line; executive portraits need time and a location walk-through. Book an hour per person, in their own space, and give the photographer a sentence about what each person does and what the image is for.

Make two versions: a portrait for press and profiles, and a matching headshot for the team page so the leadership section is consistent with everyone else. A good corporate photographer will do both in the same session.

Refresh executive portraits every two to three years, or whenever there’s a title change. The announcement of a new CEO shouldn’t run with the photo from when he was CFO.

Evan Scales photographs executive portraits, leadership teams, and corporate headshots in Boston and New York City, alongside his work with independent schools, universities, and healthcare organizations across the Northeast.