Portraits Quotes - Page 2

• I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.

  Toyin Odutola

  Wall, Okay, Wanted

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

  Walker Evans

  Ideas, Documentaries, Mankind

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

  Samuel Johnson

  Success, Persons

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• The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

  Richard Avedon

  Cameras, Way, Photographer

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• A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Fiction, Photographer

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

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Mixtures, Painting, Caricatures

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• A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Facts, Opinion

  "ART; In the Portrait Game, the Photographer Wins" by Vicki Goldberg, www.nytimes.com. March 13, 1994.

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• Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live.

  August Sander

  Photography, Mirrors, Psychological

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• With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Taken, Daguerreotypes, Looks

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• Sometimes the picture someone else paints of us is a more accurate portrayal than a reflection. What we see in the mirror is always reversed. A portrait not only allows us to see our own faces, but how it looks to others.

  Megan Hart

  Reflection, Mirrors, Looks

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

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Portraiture, Self Portrait, Satisfied

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• When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.

  Giles Duley

  Intimacy, Minutes, Given

  "Giles Duley Interview by Lisa Rueff". www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Dog, Humble, Thinking

  Letter to his wife (October 23, 1907). "Letters on Cézanne". Book by Rainer Maria Rilke, 1952.

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• 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.

  Joyce Tenneson

  Photography, Creative, Energy

  "Dialogues with Great Photographers - Joyce Tenneson". Interview with Kyle Harris, www.hlphotogallery.com.

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• 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.

  Robert Ryan

  Character, Eye, Feelings

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• They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

  Frida Kahlo

  Dream, Reality, Surrealism

  Frida Kahlo (1978). “Frida Kahlo, 1910-1954: an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago”

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• It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.

  Max Beerbohm

  Strength, Nature, Men

  Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.95, New York Review of Books

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• Your library is your portrait.

  Holbrook Jackson

  Writing, Library

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• Perhaps I have not lined his portrait too clearly. But if he exists, if only for the reason that I have imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten.

  Henry Miller

  Blue, Return, Quiet

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• 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

  Photography, Art, Careers

  Susan Sontag (2011). “On Photography”, p.93, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

  Pablo Picasso

  Artist, Eggs, Starting

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• Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

  John Singer Sargent

  Funny, Art, Truth

  Quoted in Evan Esar, A Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1949)

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• Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

  William Butler Yeats

  Friendship, Real Friends, Men

  New Poems (1938) "The Municipal Gallery Re-visited"

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• I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

  Samuel Johnson

  Dog, Pain, World

  Quoted in Mrs Piozzi Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786).

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• Self-portraits are a way of revealing something about oneself.

  Eric Kandel

  Self, Revealing Something, Way

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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