Portraits Quotes - Page 15

• 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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• Steve Sailer gives us the real Barack Obama, who turns out to be very, very different - and much more interesting - than the bland healer/uniter image stitched together out of whole cloth this past six years by Obama's packager, David Axelrod. Making heavy use of Obama's own writings, which he admires for their literary artistry, Sailer gives the deepest insights I have yet seen into Obama's lifelong obsession with 'race and inheritance,' and rounds off his brilliant character portrait with speculations on how Obama's personality might play out in the Presidency.

  John Derbyshire

  Real, Character, Writing

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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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• Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

  Steven Soderbergh

  Moving, Drug, World

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• The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can.

  Terrence Howard

  Beautiful, Artist, Self

  "Terrence Dashon Howard: A rising star". Interview with Jason Zingale, www.bullz-eye.com. August 05, 2005.

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• I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

  Cindy Sherman

  Self, Looks, Photographer

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• Passonate, irreverent, utterly relevant, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk offers an unforgettable portrait of a reluctant hero. Ben Fountain writes like a man inspired and his razor sharp exploration of our contemporary ironies will break your heart.

  Margot Livesey

  Hero, Writing, Heart

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Writing, Myth, Draws

  "What Is Literature?: And Other Essays".

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• 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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• 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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• Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren't meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible.

  Cindy Sherman

  Silly, Thinking, Self

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• You cheated!” He looked at her, wide-eyed with feigned outrage. “I beg your pardon. If you were a man, I would call you out for that accusation.” “And I assure you, my lord, that I would ride forth victoriously on behalf of truth, humility, and righteousness.” “Are you quoting the Bible to me?” “Indeed,” she said primly, the portrait of piousness. “While gambling.” “What better location to attempt to reform one such as you?

  Sarah MacLean

  Humility, Men, Gambling

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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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• 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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