A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed — Richard Avedon
Portraits are the most intimate photographs. The image will survive the subject. — Victor Skrebneski
When you photograph a face . . .you photograph the soul behind it. — Jean-Luc Godard
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. — Alexander Rodchenko
Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character. — Hedi Slimane
My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness. — Paul Strand
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
To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Photography is a major force in explaining man to man. — Edward Steichen
A good photograph is knowing where to stand. — Ansel Adams
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul! — Ted Grant
A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you. — Brigitte Bardot
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes a precise moment in time. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Short Portrait Photography Quotes
Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. — Dorothea Lange
Photography is a strange phenomenon... You trust your eye and cannot help but bare your soul. — Inge Morath
A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it. — Edward Steichen
The principal person in a picture is light. — Edouard Manet
Portrait Photography Image Quotes
Photography is about capturing souls, not smiles.
Self Portrait Photography Quotes
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it ... Autograph your work with excellence. — Vince Lombardi
In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do. — Richard Schmid
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
A photograph is the pause button of life.
It says in the Bible, in plain words, that God made a self-portrait. He created man in His own image - man and woman - for God is Love.Why should we start thinking of a god up in the clouds with wings, if He dwells within us in the spirit of Love?! — Thor Heyerdahl
I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do. — Francis Bacon
your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary. — Chuck Palahniuk
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests. — Joyce Tenneson
I have always loved the amateur side of photography, automatic photographs, accidental photographs with uncentered compositions, heads cut off, whatever. I incite people to make their self-portraits. I see myself as their walking photo booth. — William Klein
The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture. — Burton Silverman
I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence. — Young-ha Kim
Photography Quotes
It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera... they are made with the eye, heart and head. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person. — Saul Leiter
Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. — Ziad K. Abdelnour
I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical. — Trent Parke
Only photography has been able to divide human life
into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence. — Eadweard Muybridge
You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either. — Galen Rowell
Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. — Ansel Adams
I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. — Mark Rothko
I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do. — Sally Mann
The biggest cliche in Photography is Sunrise and Sunset. — Catherine Opie
Fashion Photography Quotes
Very often I say to myself: I would like to make a photo where nothing happens. But in order to eliminate, there has to be something to begin with. For nothing to happen, something has to happen first. — Sarah Moon
Put on a sweater and really great sneakers with a big scarf, and you’ll look so stylish. For me, they are an everyday essential. — Meghan Markle
For me, fashion is one of the biggest changes. I never got to wear Chanel or anything like that, growing up, or really experience fashion the way I get to now. — Sadie Sink
I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
Since I was a little girl, I have always been interested in make-up and fashion. — Lisa Manoban
I think that’s what’s so fun about fashion: that I don’t have to be defined by one particular style. It’s whatever I’m feeling that day. — Sadie Sink
I’ve always kind of had this interest in fashion. — Sadie Sink
It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.
What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting. — Helmut Newton
I love fashion, and I simply enjoy good design in clothes and regard that as one of my hobbies. — Martha C. Nussbaum
I’ve been working seriously in giving fashion a place that it deserves. — Diane Von Furstenberg
I'm not a social person. Not that I'm not at ease. I'm pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It's not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that's all. — Karl Lagerfeld
Professional Photographer Quotes
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow. — Imogen Cunningham
If it makes you laugh, if it makes you cry, if it rips out your heart, that's a good picture. — Eddie Adams
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. — Aaron Siskind
No matter how sophisticated the camera, the photographer is still the one that makes the picture.
If you are out there shooting, things will happen for you. If you're not out there, you'll only hear about it. — Jay Maisel
If I am at a party, I want to be at the party. Too many photographers use the camera to avoid participating in things. They become professional observers. — Robert Mapplethorpe
I think not being a professional photographer was actually a blessing, because it allowed me to shoot things professional photographers wouldn't shoot, or wouldn't try or attempt to shoot without lights. So I did all my stuff natural and without lights. — Dennis Hopper
Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography - that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. — Alfred Stieglitz
There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning. — Pablo Picasso
It pleases me to take amateur photographs of my garden, and it pleases my garden to make my photographs look professional. — Robert Breault
Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera. — Eliot Porter
Art Photography Quotes
The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography. — Helmut Newton
Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography. — El Lissitzky
The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects. — Wassily Kandinsky
To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. — Elliott Erwitt
Nowadays, with digital printing, it's so easy to make everything perfect, which is not always a good idea. Sometimes the mistakes are really what make a piece. — Cindy Sherman
I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art. — Alexander Rodchenko
I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer. — Irving Penn
Art is all about doing what you shouldn't. — Nobuyoshi Araki
The pictures are there, and you just take them. — Robert Capa
There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste — Helmut Newton
Photography Subject Quotes
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. — Henri CartierBresson
Photography is a very subtle thing. You must let the camera take you by the hand, as it were, and lead you into your subject. — Margaret Bourke-White
The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way. — Margaret Bourke-White
The idea that any photography can't be personal is madness! I see something; it goes through my eye, brain, heart, guts; I choose the subject. What could be more personal than that? — Cornell Capa
Looking and seeing are two different things. What matters is the relationship with the subject. — Christophe Agou
Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected. — Robert Frank
A photograph isn't necessarily a lie, but nor is it the truth. It's more of a fleeting, subjective impression. What I most like about photography is the moment that you can't anticipate: you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected. — Martine Franck
Photography is like a found object. A photographer never makes an actual subject; they just steal the image from the world... Photography is a system of saving memories. It's a time machine, in a way, to preserve the memory, to preserve time. — Hiroshi Sugimoto
Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes. — Robin Leach
I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both. — Garry Winogrand
Photo Shoots Quotes
What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. — Karl Lagerfeld
For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second. — Marc Riboud
The eye should learn to listen before it looks. — Robert Frank
If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it. — John Loengard
Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk. — Edward Weston
There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes. — Abraham Lincoln
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. — Richard Avedon
My favorite thing about doing photo shoots is just being able to have fun, meeting new people, getting dressed up, and I just love doing it. So, I have a lot of fun. — Kendall Jenner
I'm self-conscious in photo shoots. I much prefer to do interviews and talk about the work. — Joseph Morgan
Documentary Photography Quotes
I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx. — Aaron Siskind
I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose. — W. Eugene Smith
Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. — Walker Evans
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph. — Dorothea Lange
What I believe is really good in the so-called documentary approach to photography is the addition of lyricism.[this quality] is usually produced unconsciously and even unintentionally and accidentally by the cameraman. — Walker Evans
I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people's, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area. — Alex Webb
To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships. — Aaron Siskind
Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world. — Allan Sekula
[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan
Color Photography Quotes
Color in a picture is like enthusiasm in life. — Vincent Van Gogh
One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty... absolute certainty. — Paul Outerbridge
Seeing the Earth for the first time in orbit, you will be surprised that you never noticed the quality and texture of colors. — Peggy Whitson
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. — Nobuyoshi Araki
In black and white you suggest, in color you state. — Paul Outerbridge
I believe that the essence of photography is black and white. Color is but a deviance. — Sarah Moon
Only in black and white can I see the design and textures. I don't consider color photography art. Black and white is an interpretation. Color is a duplication. — Clyde Butcher
My clothes are great for a honeymoon: They’re light and sexy, colorful and pretty, and not expensive. — Diane Von Furstenberg
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face. — Edward Steichen
My philosophy, like color television, is all there in black and white. — Graham Chapman
Nature Photography Quotes
When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears. — Philippe Halsman
The purpose of all my photos is to capture the power of nature and convey it in a way that inspires someone to feel passionate and connected to the image. — Peter Lik
I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire — Gregory Crewdson
If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented. — Edgar Allan Poe
The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
I do not object to retouching, dodging or accentuation as long as they do not interfere with the natural qualities of photographic technique. — Alfred Stieglitz
I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I've ever done. It's a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light. — Galen Rowell
Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light. — Berenice Abbott
I like small things, I like small moments that are almost elliptical, that are not necessarily linear; they're natural things that happen in the world, but if you look at them from a slight angle there's more than meets the eye. — Keith Carter
Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy
Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait. — Lori Earley
As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. — Yasumasa Morimura
In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe. — Irving Penn
I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography—that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms. — Joel Meyerowitz
If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience. — Yousuf Karsh
What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it. — Aubrey Beardsley
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
In a portrait, I’m looking for the silence in somebody. — Henri Cartier-Bresson
Beauty can be seen in all things. — Matt Hardy
And I was very successful at baby photography... Strange isn't it? Because some of my portraits of babies were - I used dramatic lighting, shadow lighting, and I didn't use flash. We didn't have flash in those days, we just had floodlights, and I was photographing babies as I would an object - an inanimate object, for that matter. — Julius Shulman
The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait. — Lucas Samaras
The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible. — Thomas Struth
I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust. — Thomas Ruff
Portrait photography never had any charms for me, so I sought my subjects from the house-tops, and finally from the hill-tops and about the surrounding country; the taste strengthening as my successes became greater in proportion to the failures. — William Henry Jackson
Everything is a self-portrait.
Everything is a diary. — Chuck Palahniuk
When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes-they're not part of the good picture you want. — Andy Warhol
When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but... my portrait is a culmination of elements... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot. — Jamie Wyeth
An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me. — Jacques Derrida
Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits. — Richard Zimler
Obviously, we can see what was in front of the camera, but if a photograph is honestly made, it's a bit of a self-portrait. I think it's impossible for a photographer who is working honestly to keep this from happening. — John Sexton
When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. — Richard Avedon
People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography. — Robert Mapplethorpe
It's shot by Ben Rayner who I think is very talented at doing portrait photography as well as fashion photography. His images never look like a model. You know, it doesn't look like a faceless model just wearing whatever. There's always personality that comes through. That was quite important for me to capture. — Alexa Chung
When I first came to America there still was Look Magazine and LIFE Magazine, and the photography in those magazines was amazing to look at. They had the best portraits, and their news photography. — Vilmos Zsigmond
In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman. — Louis Fabian Bachrach, Jr.
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
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know. — Francis Bacon
The tradition of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography, but it has had a much more limited career in photography considered as art. Generally speaking, the honors have gone to the Cordelias. — Susan Sontag
In Conclusion
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