Top 26 Photography Portrait Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The portrait is the subject matter in photography where the problems of the media are the most visible.
Thomas Struth
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I believe that street photography is central to the issue of photography - that it is purely photographic, whereas the other genres, such as landscape and portrait photography, are a little more applied, more mixed in the with the history of painting and other art forms.
Joel Meyerowitz
#9. Slow down, take time, allow yourself to be wildly diverted from your plan. People are the soul of the place; don't forget to meet them and enjoy their company as you explore a place.
David DuChemin
#10. 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
#11. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.
Helmut Newton
#17. A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.
Edward Steichen
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. In a few years, it is very likely that this series will be considered a milestone in the history of Singapore photography.
Raphael Millet
#22. 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
#23. I see myself through others eyes and I am made anew.
Molly Moore
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
