Arbus takes a completely unflinching view of her subjects. It's as if she is daring us to see the imperfections of the person or to deem them not beautiful.
She seems fascinated to the point of obsession with humanity... warts and all. Her subjects are often everyday joes or the fringes of society; the last people you would think of as apt portrait subjects.
She uses a very harsh light, and frames people head-on; hardly the most flattering portrayal.
Steichen on the other hand often deals with celebrities and people of renown. His camera is much more flattering towards his subjects, practically deifying them.
He uses angles that present the sitter from a magnifying angle.
The lighting in Steichen's portraits is usually very soft, giving his subjects a glow that glosses over any imperfections.
Two portrait photographers that I've come across in my personal photo-lookin' are Benoit Paillé (Benoit P.) and Pieter Hugo. Both photographers are very contemporary in that their portraits are in color, and often highly saturated at that. They both seem most comfortable working in natural light, and their portraits give the sense that they're not set up; the subjects are photographed pretty much where the photographer found them with little intervention on the photographer's part.
Benoit P. is from Quebec, actually, and his approach to portraiture is to choose people from the street; perfect strangers, to pose.
Though his subjects are your average, run-of-the-mill people, Benoit is still able to capture something unique about each one.
He tends to favor a square crop with the subject directly in the center of the photo.
Pieter Hugo is a photographer working from Africa, specifically Nigeria and Liberia. He has several series of which these portraits are taken, notably "Hyenas and Other Men" and "Nollywood."
Though he is working in a completely different geographical location than Benoit P, there is a similarity in the styles of the two photographers. Something about the respect that you feel in the images towards the subject...
Hugo, too, uses natural lighting and a minimum of intervention with the subject, thus presenting the scene just as you feel he must have come across it.
Neither photographer is working with stars or celebrities like Edward Steichen, but nor are they trying to shock or provoke with their choice of subject or lighting in the way that Arbus did. Instead, both contemporary photographers present their average subject with dignity and invite us to recognize the extraordinary in the people we come across in our day-to-day lives. Though we as residents of North America are probably more familiar with the types of people that Paillé photographs, Hugo gives the distinct impression that if we were to travel to his part of the world, it wouldn't be long before we happened upon subjects such as the ones populating his images.
