Quotes About Portraiture

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

I think of something I read about Sargent: how in portraiture, Sargent always looked for the animal in the sitter (a tendency that, once I knew to look for it, I saw everywhere in his work: in the long foxy noses and pointed ears of Sargent's heiresses, in his rabbit-toothed intellectuals and leonine captains of industry, his plump, owl-faced children).

It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.

I'm more interested in photographing people who have done something, like writers or directors - even billionaires - as long as I can study them before I photograph them.

What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.

I like to talk to people and, obviously, to photograph them.

I try and photograph people as they are. I do not want to hide anything. I want to bring across a personality, a humanity. It is not a case of model A or model B against a white background. I am interested in the person.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given.

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen.

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

I sometimes like the pictures photographers take of me.

God often lays the sum of His amazing providences in very dismal afflictions; as the limner first puts on the dusky colors, on which he intends to draw the portraiture of some illustrious beauty.

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

I've photographed just about everyone in the world. But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.

When you involve people, they come out, you see them, you get to see their sense of humor.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Painting has the ability to communicate something about the sitter that gets to his essence.

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

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.

In portraiture I look for people that I recognise – 'Look, it's Uncle Tony' – or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud's school of art appreciation.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is 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.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.