Portrait Photography Quotes

Portraiture is something that we're all drawn to. I think primarily other forms - we prefer, by and large, to look at human beings than a bowl of fruit.

Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).

On the personal side, I was rock climbing and taking pictures with my friends. We took all sorts of portrait and action pictures, and I was thinking at the time that these are inherently difficult to focus correctly.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

I'm very particular who I work with. I'm not interested in portraying women with a cliched, generic look. I'm interested in a model who I can take a portrait of.

I have very interesting hobbies like archeology and photography.

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

I can't be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs. (To Julia Margaret Cameron)

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.

Irving Penn said he didn't want to photograph anyone under 60, and I think there is some truth about it.

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

My friend, why should you wish to shorten my life by taking from me my shadow? (To photographer Dr. Valentine T. McGillycuddy.)

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.

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.

The head of the photographer is more important than his camera

None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.

With a woman I try to photograph her beauty; with a man I try to show his character. Once I photographed a man with a big nose (Jimmy Durante), and emphasized his nose, and he was very pleased with the picture. That could not happen with a woman. The most intelligent woman will reject a portrait if it doesn't flatter her.

I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.

I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: "You're much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago." And she replied: "But I'm also three weeks older.

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.

In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

My mom was a medical photographer, but on the side, she did a before-and-after glam photography business in the house. She would do makeup and hair - and I was her assistant.

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.

I got a camera when I was nine years old and it wasn't until I was a model that I realized you could be a photographer for a job.