Portraits Quotes - Page 16

• A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the theory of reincarnation.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Men, Personality, Aging

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• It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Men, Expression, Intellectual

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer”, p.194, Simon and Schuster

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• Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.

  Michael Faraday

  Science, Chemistry, Electricity

  Michael Faraday, Christian Friedirich Schoenbein (1899). “The letters of Faraday and Schoenbein 1836-1862: With notes, comments and references to contemporary letters”

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• I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

  Georg Baselitz

  Art, Hair, Work Out

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• I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.

  Walt Whitman

  War, Sadness, Eye

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• Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Writing, Intelligent, People

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• People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.

  Robert Mapplethorpe

  Photography, People, Waiting

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Echoes, People

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• If it's a likeness, alone, it's not a success. If, through my portraits, you can come to know the subjects more meaningfully, if it synthesizes your feelings toward someone whose work has imprinted itself on your mind--if you see a photograph and say, 'Yes, this is the person,' with a little new insight--that is a beautiful experience.

  Yousuf Karsh

  Beautiful, Photography, Feelings

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• When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, People, Alive

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• A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's 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. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Real, Doe

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• In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Country, Law

  Robert Adams, Maren Stange (1990). “Paul Strand: essays on his life and work”

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• According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Men, Body

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• It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think - and it is not at all monstrous in me to say that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist's work ever produced.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Photography, Lying

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1954). “Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: the unpublished letters of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford”

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• 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.

  Yousuf Karsh

  Example, Photographer, Should

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• I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.

  Richard Avedon

  Forever, Records, Height

  "All About Audrey" by Pamela Fiori, www.harpersbazaar.com. January 23, 2013.

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• There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it. It's a pleasure to make a living that way. It's pleasure and then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It's not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.

  Richard Avedon

  Fashion, Important, Way

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• My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.

  Annie Leibovitz

  Long, Childhood, Encounters

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• I think self-portraits are very difficult. I’ve always seen mine as straightforward, very stripped down, hair pulled back. No shirt. Whatever light happened to be available. I’d want it to be very graphic – about darkness and light. No one else should be there, but I’m scared to do it by myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The whole idea of a self-portrait is strange. I’m so strongly linked to how I see through the camera that to get to the other side of it would be difficult. It would be as if I were taking a photograph in the dark.

  Annie Leibovitz

  Dark, Thinking, Light

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• All photographs are self-portraits.

  Minor White

  Self, Photographer, Photograph

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• This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Irises, Ifs

  Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Schimmel, Thomas E. Crow, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) (2005). “Robert Rauschenberg: combines”, Steidl / Edition7L

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• To anyone who has served in Washington, there is something oddly familiar about [having your portrait painted]. First, you're painted into a corner, then you're hung out to dry and, finally, you're framed.

  Warren Christopher

  Dry, Firsts, Framed

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• What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors.

  John L. Casti

  Song, Teaching, Math

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• News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.

  Walter W. Powell

  Media, Organization, Worry

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• The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.

  William Macneile Dixon

  Confusion, Facts, Clutter

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