Rineke Dijkstra
[Photographer, b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam.]
I don’t need to know anything about the people I photograph, but it’s important that I recognize something about myself in them.
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.
Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.
Georgia O'Keeffe
[Artist, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]
If they had known what a close relationship he would have needed to photograph [them] the way he photographed me—I think they wouldn’t have been interested.
(On men who wanted Alfred Stieglitz to photograph their wives or girlfriends, 1922.)
Charles Baudelaire
[Writer, b. 1821, Paris, d. 1867, Paris.]
A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound?
(1859)
Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]
Andre Breton once said that a portrait should not only be an image but an oracle one questions, and that the photographer’s aim should be a profound likeness, which physically and morally predicts the subject’s entire future.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
I’ve got incredible power in my closet. Not power to do harm—just the feeling that I’ve captured people who have since died and people who will never look that way again. The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.
Richard Avedon
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 2004, San Antonio, Texas.]
A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion—an occasion rather than a truth.
