Jean-Luc Godard Quotes

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing.

I love to draw people's faces. I do that all the time.

For the camera, particularly, I feel like - I think that, as human faces become older, they become more interesting.

Features, the great soul's apparent seat.

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.

When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

The good painter must paint two things: a person and the essence of his soul.

I've always loved [Elsa Dorfman] work. I've loved her and her work is so much an expression of her. One of the reasons to make the film is to expose Elsa, hopefully, to a wider audience.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

The love is the part of us that can never go. It's the essence that was always there, so that can never go.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.

My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

Is it him?” Dad asked. “Did he get you into trouble?” “Not me,” Shane said. “I’ve just got that kind of face.

The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.

The camera gives you some control.

The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.

What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.

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

I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.

I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it.