Portraits Quotes Page 2

Through a portrait, we can potentially see everything — the history and depth of a person's life, as well as evidence of a primal universal presence. I have dedicated my life and creative energy to capturing these transcendent moments in which a connection is made between the subject, the photographer, and the viewer.

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

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

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.

I was told David Letterman and Kaufman had heart attacks on the same day: David Letterman's heart attack was at a hospital in NYC. Kaufman's heart attack was at the red light district in Amsterdam, Holland. I think Kaufman had more fun. You're a great artist. I just love the way you painted my portrait.

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.

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.

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.

Type is one of the most eloquent means of expression in every epoch of style.

Next to architecture, it gives the most characteristic portrait of a period and the most severe testimony of a nation's intellectual status.

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

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

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

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Fellow-Christians, do let us study the Bible portrait of the humble man.

And let us ask our brethren, and ask the world, whether they recognize in us the likeness to the original.

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?!

There is no self-portrait of me.

I have never painted a self-portrait.

I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

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.

All photographs are self-portraits.

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

When I look in the mirror, I am slightly reminded of self-portraits by Durer and by Rembrandt, because they both show a degree of introspection. I see some element of disappointment; I see a sense of humour, but also something that is faintly ridiculous; and I see somebody who is frightened of being found out and thought lightweight.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won't come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me--a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

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.

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.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

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.

Many photographers feel their client is the subject.

My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety.

So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.

Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?