Portraits Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

There is no self-portrait of me.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.