1.
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.
David Amram
2.
My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
3.
A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.
Umberto Boccioni
4.
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.
Matt Hardy
5.
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.
Marvin Harris
7.
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.
Chuck Close
8.
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.
Nick Brandt
9.
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.
Paul Caponigro
10.
I have several portraits of Jigoro Kano and a bust too, a very beautiful one.
Vladimir Putin
11.
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.
Richard Avedon
12.
The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
Anatole Broyard
13.
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject.
Victor Skrebneski
14.
The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .
Agnes Varda
15.
I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house.
Willa Ford
16.
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
Philippe Halsman
17.
Your dreams are the product of your longings, a portrait of your potential, and a promise of your future.
Erwin McManus
18.
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.
Cindy Sherman
19.
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
Jawaharlal Nehru
20.
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
Philippe Halsman
21.
They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
22.
[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then,
with teeth or without?
Queen Elizabeth II
23.
I will never, for the future, paint the portrait of a tyrant until his head lies before me on the scaffold.
Jacques-Louis David
24.
A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.
John Singer Sargent
25.
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
26.
I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject,
rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
Salvador Dali
27.
Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.
Lucian Freud
29.
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.
Paul Strand
30.
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.
Yousuf Karsh
31.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
Richard Avedon
34.
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.
Marina Abramovic
35.
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.
Paul Strand
37.
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.
August Sander
38.
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.
Francis Bacon
39.
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.
Pedro Almodovar
40.
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.
Paul Cezanne
41.
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker Evans
43.
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.
Richard Avedon
44.
Each person's work is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Johnson
46.
For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.
Wolfgang Tillmans
47.
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.
Oswald Spengler
48.
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.
Imogen Cunningham
49.
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.
Annie Leibovitz
50.
Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.
Salvador Dali