Self Portrait Photography Quotes

• The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

  Agnes Varda

  Mirrors, Self, Portraits

  Interview with Liza Bear, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 22, 2009.

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• Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Motivational, Success

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• I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

  Frida Kahlo

  Love, Art, Happy Friday

  Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo (1992). “Frida Kahlo”, Rizzoli International Publications

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• The self-portrait is an act of objectifying the self and in that regard is a unique form of portraiture.

  Burton Silverman

  Unique, Self, Portraits

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• Everything is a self-portrait.
  Everything is a diary.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Self, Portraits, Diaries

  "Diary". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, www.litro.co.uk. 2003.

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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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• My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, People, Cameras

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

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• I loathe my own face, and I've done self-portraits because I've had nobody else to do.

  Francis Bacon

  Self, Portraits, Portraiture

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• your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Self, Hands, Giving

  "Diary". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, August 26, 2003.

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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, Portraits, Looks

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• 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

  Photography, Artist, Self

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• When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes-they're not part of the good picture you want.

  Andy Warhol

  Self, Pimples, Portraits

  Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.75, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Eye, Wrinkles, Hair

  Chuck Palahniuk (2003). “Diary: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

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• I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.

  Young-Ha Kim

  Self, Soul, Portraits

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, p.7, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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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• In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do.

  Richard Schmid

  Art, Self, Experience

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• Painting has always been a means of self-expression for me. Therefore, I paint because I have to and need to, not necessarily because I want to. Subconsciously or not, the figures I paint are a reflection of myself and whatever mood I am in at the time, so every painting is in essence a self-portrait.

  Lori Earley

  Mean, Reflection, Self

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• I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

  Gustav Klimt

  Morning, Night, Self

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• It says in the Bible, in plain words, that God made a self-portrait. He created man in His own image - man and woman - for God is Love.Why should we start thinking of a god up in the clouds with wings, if He dwells within us in the spirit of Love?!

  Thor Heyerdahl

  Men, Thinking, Clouds

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• Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

  Yasumasa Morimura

  Photography, Self, Doe

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• Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Art, Book, Hero

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• Bruheem kol dumuyay eloha! Blessed are all God's self-portraits.

  Richard Zimler

  Blessed, Self, Portraits

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• The selfie era offers a big opening: everybody can do it; nowadays even five-year-olds know how to take a nude self-portrait.

  Lucas Samaras

  Years, Self, Eras

  "Lucas Samaras: Father Of The Selfies". Interview with Michael Skafidas, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 7, 2014.

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  Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece.

  Kai Greene

  Art, Bodybuilding, Self

  FaceBook post by Kai Greene from Jul 26, 2011

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• An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.

  Jacques Derrida

  Self, Drawing, Portraits

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