I'd say build it yourself. If you have photos you want to show off, use this "for-photos" CMS called Koken- I absolutely love it. Not using it now while I rebuild my (basic) portfolio but plan to again in the near future. A ton of photo-centric admin options and a super clean backend interface. Easy to theme and integrate into your handbuilt HTML/CSS site.

After using WordPress for years I switched over to Kirby and love it.

I highly recommend http://www.siteleaf.com a Jekyll logic based static site CMS with a well designed GUI and excellent flexibility.

I've done a lot of research on CMS's and Statamic is my favorite one. It would be particularly nice for a portfolio site because it's extremely easy to create and use custom fields and post types. It's also flat–file, which I love. It's what I'm using for my own site.

I recommend doing a static site mostly because it's great to learn and fun to mess around. You can even mess around with different frameworks and what not.

I just started using Metalsmith and it's really awesome and crazy flexible.

Great thing about static sites is that you can throw them on github pages also.

I would highly recommend Indexhibit CMS (http://www.indexhibit.org), which has really nice support and it's fully customizable.

WOW! Thanks for all the replies guys, what a response!

I'm sure this will help others in my situation in the future so it really is appreciated.

I think I'm going to go with Vincent's advice...

I agree that it's going to be better to test (play) with my own site and try new things, where I have more time, than a client's site where a CMS would make more sense.

Thanks everyone for posting all these great static website resources.

My short two cents on CMS vs static is that it all depends on how you're positioning your portfolio. If you're regularly updating it, then it makes sense to use a CMS. I personally wouldn't.

I'm going to try Statamic soon, should be good.

I use Kirby for client work and so I considered it. I wanted to try out Jekyll and I built 90% of my site in it. Pretty awesome, there was something I wanted to do that went beyond Kirby do now I am using middleman. Middleman is a bit more like doing front end development for a ruby app but it is stills static site generator and pretty nice.

I recently get an invite from www.dropr.com and I really like it. Try it out. Very minimal, simple and clean. And RESPONSIVE, which is a big plus.

I did this research recently, and here was the consideration set:

http://cactusformac.com/http://koken.me/http://jekyllrb.com/http://middlemanapp.com/http://statamic.com/http://virb.com/http://getkirby.com/http://assemble.io/http://buildwithcraft.com/http://dunked.com/

I ended up going with Cactus for Mac, and have been very happy with how well it works out of the box, while remaining heavily customizable.

If you manage to make all in 1 page, with decent result I think it will be enough.

4ormat - http://4ormat.com

Try http://salon.io - it has a neat drag 'n drop interface + a large community of photographers and designer showcasing their work. It's also free.

I fully plan on building out a custom portfolio, but have used Dunked in the meantime and find it super intuitive, easy to use, and very affordable.

You can check out the result here: crispypixels.me

I just built mine out with Jekyll and hosted it on github. It's nice to have things templated so you aren't copying and pasting your base html on every single page, but still keeps it simple.

If what Vincent said doesn't match your preference http://www.squarespace.com/ is a solid solution that requires little actual management of content and gives you responsiveness from the get go. If you want your portfolio to just be a barely-there holder of your work that might be for you.

There's also http://dunked.com/ which is similar.