Portrait Photography Quotes

One of the oldest types of photography is portrait photography. It can range from shooting your family members to friends to pets. It is often called portraiture and this type of photographer abounds.

What is Portrait Photography?

"A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is 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." -Richard Avedon

Following are Amazing Portrait Photography Quotes below written by popular Portrait Photography Photographers and Authors.

Portrait Photography Quotes

• The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt. -Henri Cartier-Bresson

• The majority of the people I've taken photographs of, I've had conversations with. "What are your goals and aspirations?" "What are you about?" It's not just about me capturing the image; I want to know what you are about. -Jamel Shabazz

• If I create anything, I create an atmosphere of trust and openness. -Sante D'Orazio

• My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain. -Helmut Newton

• I am very, very tuned into people. If something's wrong, I can sense it from the moment they walk in the studio. -Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

•  Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable. -Sally Mann

• I sort of fall in love with them when I'm photographing them - men and women -David Bailey

• A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is 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. -Richard Avedon

• The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader. -Irving Penn

• A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. -Diane Arbus

• When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message. -Don McCullin

• Within every man and woman, a secret is hidden, and as a photographer, it is my task to reveal it if I can. The revelation, if it comes at all, will come in a small fraction of a second with an unconscious gesture, a gleam of the eye, a brief lifting of the mask that all humans wear to conceal their innermost selves from the world. In that fleeting interval of opportunity, the photographer must act or lose his prize. -Yousuf Karsh

• I don't see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary. I see them simply as people in front of my lens. -Eve Arnold

• What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don’t want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph. -​Sebastião Salgado

• I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself. -Arnold Newman

• ​Success in photography, portraiture especially, is dependent on being able to grasp those supreme instants which pass with the ticking of a clock, never to be duplicated - so light, balance - expression must be seen - felt as it were - in a flash, the mechanics and technique being so perfected in one as to be absolutely automatic. -Edward Weston

• I believe that everyone wears a mask, and beneath that mask is another mask. So what photographers can reveal are the various masks we all wear. -Matthew Rolston

• For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You're photographing a relationship with the person you're shooting; there's an exchange, and that's what that picture is. -Peter Lindbergh

• 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

• I want to do the definitive picture of the person at the moment, I say it all the time and it’s the clearest way that I can describe what I do. Honor the art form. Take pictures that are going to last forever. -Jonathan Mannion

• A true portrait should, today and a hundred years from today, the Testimony of how this person looked and what kind of human being he was. -Philippe Halsman

• The portrait photographers that we tend to idolize have a great sense of design and compassion. I think the marriage of compassion and design is really what makes, in my opinion, a really wonderful moment. -Mark Seliger

• I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I've lost. -Nan Goldin

• I seek what lies beneath surface beauty. What interests me are intimate human complexities – the darkness as well as the light. I cannot will this kind of transcendent communication into existence. I have to be open and truly present, and if I am lucky, grace descends. My best photographs are an honest collaboration, and when the viewer also connects, I feel the circle is complete. -Joyce Tennyson

• The camera has no opinion, no emotion, it just renders — and so the emotional components of a photograph live on each side of the camera. -Norman Jean Roy

• As a photographer, I am not interested in pointing my camera at the pathos of other people's lives. I don't try to reveal or to probe. I certainly don't try to capture souls. If any soul is revealed, it's mine. -Elsa Dorfman

• When you photograph a face... you photograph the soul behind it. -Jean-Luc Godard

• The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth. -Edward Steichen

• For me, it is essential to understand that everyone is alone. Not in the sense of loneliness, but rather in the sense that no one can completely understand someone else. I know very well what Diane Arbus means when she says that one cannot crawl into someone else’s skin, but there is always an urge to do so anyway. I want to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed. -Rineke Dijkstra

• For me, a portrait is something from which you feel the person, their inner quality, what it is that makes them who they are. -Herb Ritts

• A portrait can go wrong because the sitter doesn’t let himself go. Even a tiny gesture, a light relaxation, a very small movement can lead a sitting in the right direction. A good portrait is a rapport that is established between two people, there has to be someone in front of the camera and someone behind it. -Jeanloup Sieff

• ​So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits them. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer. -Imogen Cunningham

• "I'm just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven't had the best breaks in society. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence." -Mary Ellen Mark

• I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost. -Nan Goldin

• Beauty is in the eye of the checkbook holder. -Dean Collins

• A photographic close-up is perhaps the purest form of portraiture, creating a confrontation between the viewer and the subject that daily interaction makes impossible, or at least impolite. -Martin Schoeller

• When I first started making portraits for magazines, I realized my images were going to be competing against giant headlines, so I decided to make my pictures into logos - very bold, and very declaratory. I also wanted to create a stark, even unforgiving realism with my lighting. My ambition is to show more truth in my images than viewers are comfortable with. I think the secret of making a good portrait is to go into it being brutally honest. -Platon

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