Portraits Quotes

Portraits Quote of the day

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 portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

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.

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

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

I often concentrate on the eyes and lips, they are great indicators of mood and feeling, and I find that I can project character into my portraits by bringing the viewer's attention to these areas.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.

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

I think if you don't love people and aren't fascinated by them, you'll never succeed as a portrait photographer, because your pictures will look cold.

Sometimes I spit on my mother's portrait for pleasure.

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

Western artists stand as humans looking at nature; Asian artists try to be in nature. You become one with nature rather than painting a portrait of it. That's a big shift.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

Beauty can be seen in all things.

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

From the first shock of the contemplation of a face depends the principal sensation which guides me throughout the entire execution of a portrait.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.