Portraits Quotes

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.

Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you'd move in close.

It's one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it's another thing to make a portrait of who they are.

I have several portraits of Jigoro Kano and a bust too, a very beautiful one.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house.

A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was

Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.

I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then,
with teeth or without?

I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.

A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.

Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject,
rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

All photographs are self-portraits.

The portrait of a person is one of the most difficult things to do. It means you must almost bring the presence of that person photographed to other people in such a way that they don't have to know that person personally, but that they are still confronted with a human being that they won't forget. That's a portrait.

It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this.

There is no self-portrait of me.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed

You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

A letter is the portrait of the soul.

It is easy to make a picture of someone and call it a portrait. The difficulty lies in making a picture that makes the viewer care about a stranger.

Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live.

I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.

In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

Fruits ... like having their portrait painted. They seem to sit there and ask your forgiveness for fading. Their thought is given off with their perfumes. They come with all their scents, they speak of the fields they have left, the rain which has nourished them, the daybreaks they have seen.

Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.

The countenance is the portrait of the soul,
and the eyes mark its intentions.

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.