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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.