Best Portrait Photography Quotes & Sayings

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

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? — Anthony Trollope

There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man. — Paul Auster

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

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. — Tom Carter

Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out Training Crazy Dogs from Over-the-Top to Under Control Laura VanArendonk Baugh CPDT-KA KPACTP Copyright 2013 Laura VanArendonk Baugh Cover design by Laura VanArendonk Baugh and Alena Van Arendonk Author portrait by Elemental Photography Technical editing by Casey Lomonaco Interior photos pages 25, 67, 77 by Alena Van Arendonk — Laura VanArendonk Baugh

Among the things she said: Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist ... such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. Men portraitist are apt to forget this; they are inclined to lose the sitter in a maze of technique luxuriating in the cleverness and beauty of their own medium. — Whitney Otto

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain. — Helmut Newton

It's the difference between your wife's passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got
engaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, "She looks like this." The other says, "This is who she is to me. It's how I feel about her. See how amazing she is? — David DuChemin

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology. — Sebastiao Salgado

In the business of portrait photography, one must combine the artist and the craftsman. — Louis Fabian Bachrach Jr.

The Indians say to draw someone's portrait is to steal their soul, i am taking photographs, does it mean that i am just borrowing them? — T.A

In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography. — Raphael Millet

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Looking at Loh's photographs, it is obvious that there is nothing simpler and richer than a face when stripped of all effects and affects, poses and postures, stances and pretences. The Singaporeans featured here are almost
expressionless, as if the photographer wanted to leave us clueless about them. What do their faces tell us? Why are they so familiar? Why do we feel we know this auntie that we don't know? And this guy with the nondescript look? And this girl with no distinguishing mark? Have we met before? — Raphael Millet

Here was the real scandal of On Our Backs photography: We were women shooting other women - our names, faces, and bodies on the line - and we all brought our sexual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or Playboy, where the talent is a prop ...
When we began our magazine, female fashion and portrait models - all of them - were shot the same way kittens and puppies are photographed for holiday calendars: in fetching poses, with no intentions of their own. — Susie Bright

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew. — Molly Moore

He'd never need a camera to remember this, and damn if he ever wanted anyone but him to see her like she was at this moment. — Kelly Moran

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz. — Sigmar Polke

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

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

Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could. — Pedro Meyer

With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken - formerly it was only the prominent - and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait. — Soren Kierkegaard