When Jim Cornfield was assigned to photograph the famous author George Plimpton for an in-flight magazine in the mid-1970s, he knew that he wanted to capture a shot that, as he put it, “encapsulated the George Plimpton ethos.” Best known for his sports journalism, along with for founding The Paris Review, Plimpton was on a deadline when Cornfield arrived. Plimpton didn’t have the time or patience for a lengthy shoot so Cornfield improvised. In the corner of the room, he noticed a large wooden alligator with a trap door  and a compartment filled with a large bag of white powder. Cornfield asked for the story behind the alligator and learned the Plimpton had bought the object while shooting a documentary in Africa. Telling the story relaxed Plimpton, which made it easier for Cornfield to capture a meaningful environmental portrait of Plimpton right there and then.

Over the course of his career, Cornfield has photographed many environmental portraits while on assignment for publications, learning along the way—as the Plimpton anecdote conveys—how to tell a story with the materials available to him. “There’s a narrative tucked inside of every image,” Cornfield says, “made up of the details in the image that make the viewer question who the subject of a photograph is, and why they are being photographed.” Drawing out the essence of a person in a portrait, he notes, is an intellectual exercise. Doing it successfully, he adds, requires capturing a human being within the broad canvas of their external reality, which can be encapsulated in their  physical setting, or simply with a meaningful prop or tool from their trade. This is the foundation of successful environmental portraiture.

In his latest book, Environmental Portraiture: A Complete Guide to the Portrait Photographer’s Most Powerful Imaging Tool, Cornfield lays out both the practical and intellectual apparatus behind creating a successful environmental portrait. Equal parts field guide (the book includes loads of how-to information, including section on how to file for location permits), meditation on the history of art and photography, and personal memoir, Cornfield hopes that the book appeals to a wide audience. “It’s a good fit for readers with any kind of intellectual commitment to portraits, including art buyers, designers, collectors, directors, and of course, photographers,” he says. Ultimately, Cornfield wants the book to “stir up an interest in taking a more cerebral look at photography.”

Cornfield notes much of photojournalism is environmental portraiture. A photographer is assigned a subject for an article, and in the short amount of time allotted with the subject, that photographer tries to capture the essence of this person’s job and daily life. “The image has to read really quickly,” Cornfield says. “It has to say, here’s the person, this is what they do.”

Cornfield experienced this acutely when he was assigned to photograph Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the controversial former chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County, for a New York book publisher in the 1970s. Noguchi had presided over post-mortem investigations into the deaths of Sharon Tate, Robert F. Kennedy and Natalie Wood, among many other celebrities. In an episode recounted in the book, Cornfield talks about how he spent a morning with Noguchi in the morgue where he worked. The more he got to know the coroner, the more he admired him. By the time he finally took a portrait of Dr. Noguchi, in front of the metal vaults where the dead bodies he examined were kept, Cornfield had a deep understanding—and respect—for  the complexity of the environment. The resulting image puts Dr. Noguchi in a white lab coat directly in the center of two heavy metal doors that evoke that role and the institutional heaviness and sober nature of his job. In taking this portrait, Cornfield says, he first began to understand that environmental portraiture is “clearly more than the sum of its parts.”

Over the many years that he has been honing his craft, Cornfield has developed empathy for his subjects, as well as an ability to make connections between seemingly disparate elements in an environment. For example, in an episode recounted in the book, he discusses how photographing Kenneth Curry, a decorated Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD, brought up memories of photographing Shigeku Sasamori, a Japanese woman who survived the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. While photographing Curry in front of the Aqua 2, which was the B-52 airplane that was struck with surface-to-air missile fire while Curry was piloting it, Cornfield was struck by a memory of Sasamori looking up at a beautiful clear blue sky and seeing a gleaming B-29 (the B-52’s predecessor) drop the bomb. In the final image he took of Curry, Cornfield photographed the B-52 looming above him, evoking terrible fear and guilt. In post-production, he changed the background color of the aircraft hangar to blue to pay homage to Sasamori’s conflicted memories of the Hiroshima bombing. “There’s an ’invisible thread’ that weaves together all of the backstories at play in any given portrait scenario,” Cornfield writes in the book. “Weaving these threads together is the mark of a great environmental portrait photographer.”

Although Cornfield’s environmental portraiture book could easily be read straight through, Cornfield also imagines that readers will skip to chapters that appeal to their interests. For example, you can read a section about the art of research, or you can flip to the end to read one of Cornfield’s many case studies of masters of environmental portraiture, including chapters devoted to an A-List of contemporary shooters: Michael Grecco, Phil Borges, Joe McNally, Eric Myer, Rania Matar, Tom Atwood, Lou Jones, Al Satterwhite, Larry Schiller, Michael Wilson, and Cathy Church. The book is meant to be a living document that can equally accompany photographers on shoots or be kept by a lifelong learner on their nightstand. “There’s a lot of enjoyment you can get out of thinking about the creative ingenuity necessary to take a great environmental portrait,” Cornfield says. “It’s a satisfying intellectual exercise.”