Quotes About Portraiture

Being a woman is just a marvelous plus in photographing. Men like to be photographed by women, it becomes flirtatious and fun, and women feel less as if they're expected to be in a relationship.

It is for the artist... in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.

All art is portraiture and all art is political: those are the things that you cannot avoid. When someone sees you in your entirety for who you are, that's the greatest act of love, because it's granting you existence. And the rarest act of love is, like cinema, to see.

Of the thousands of people, celebrated and unknown, who have sat before my camera, I am often asked who was the most difficult subject, or the easiest, or which picture is my favorite. This last question is like asking a mother which child she likes the most.

I am obsessed by people. Usually I try to get the girl out of the model instead of the model out of the girl.

Harry, said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not have it taken for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes? It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied.

Portraiture keeps me humble. It's simple and straightforward. There is nothing more interesting I can make up than the figure sitting right in front of me.

For most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was he face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen. The commercialization of photography may have broadened access to portraiture somewhat, but apart from wanted posters, the image of most common people would never be widely propagated.

I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens.

I shall praise those faces which seem to project out of the picture as though they were sculptured, and I shall censure those faces in which I see no art but that of outline.

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not "what does he look like?" but "what do I look like?

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists.

Beware how in making the portraiture thou breakest the pattern: for divinity maketh the love of ourselves the pattern; the love of our neighbours but the portraiture.

Je t'ai envoyé aujourd'hui mon portrait à moi; il faut le regarder pendant quelque temps, tu verras, j'espère que ma physionomie s'est bien calmée, quoique le regard soit vague davantage qu'auparavant, à ce qui me parait.

I will tell you something else: it is a major responsibility not only of portraiture but of all human communication for each of us to help everyone else discover the best that is in him.

I like not knowing too much about somebody I'm photographing, because the process also becomes an experience for me to learn about .

My biggest fear always is that I'll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

When I talked with any one of my friends I was conscious that the original, the unique portrait of her individuality had been skilfully traced, tyranically imposed on my mind as much by the inflexions of her voice as by those of her face, and that these were two separate spectacles which rendered, each in its own plane, the same single reality.

Within every man and woman a secret is hidden, and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can.

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.