“ The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.”
— Nadar
“ The discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.”
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
“ A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound. ”
— Charles Baudelaire, 1859
“ A 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
“ Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future.”
— Sally Mann
“ It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.”
— Dorothea Lange
“ We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is.”
— Dorothea Lange
“ Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.”
— Berenice Abbott
“ If you take photographs, don’t speak, don’t write, don’t analyse yourself, and don’t answer any questions.”
— Robert Doisneau
“ Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper… the photographer begins with the finished product.”
— Edward Steichen
“ The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
— Elliott Erwitt
“ Anyone can shoot chaos. But the most perceptive photographers can make compelling pictures out of uninteresting moments.”
— Alex Tehrani
“ The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.”
— Andy Warhol
“ My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.”
— Helmut Newton
“ If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time.”
— Robert Doisneau
“ Photography has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
— Elliott Erwitt
“ The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
— Henry Thoreau
“ The subject of the picture is always more important than the picture.”
— Diane Arbus
“ Photography is truth.”
— Jean-Luc Godard
“ When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them.”
— Annie Leibovitz
