For me, creating portraits is less about creating images and more about searching for the essence of the person(s), With which I photograph. Almost everyone is somehow looking for this being themselves, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes more, sometimes less. For most people it even means a little happiness when they find character traits or traces and thus opportunities for identification - in books, films, role models, life stories, fairy tales, songs and of course in conversations.
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And I believe that today only a very few find such contributions in the photographs on which they are, as the saying goes, "represented". I consider almost everything that is created in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral or the sunset by the sea to be "wrong" in some way, if only because it depicts the person in learned, alien poses. That's why the best photos are usually the ones when you don't even know you're being photographed at all. I call such photos "street portraits" here, even if they are rarely taken on the street, because they come closest to the photos that are usually referred to as "street photography" and which can tell so much about life and people .
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Does the studio photography - the epitome of the "posed", the unnatural photos - make sense? I say yes (otherwise I wouldn't be working as a photographer). It is the setting where you can consciously and together search for this being. That happens when you get to know each other, when you take a picture, but it also happens when you choose the resulting pictures. And then when you have the pictures for yourself, look at them and talk to people about them.
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It's a bit like dancing together, even if you bring in the "technical side" as a photographer, active portraiture is ultimately about a human encounter, a willingness to show yourself to someone.