Potrait Quotes

“We wish for portraits of our friends, hoping to be reminded of their appearance and to renew our affections towards them. But why is the result so disappointing? In order to understand aesthetic appreciation, Wittgenstein once said, ‘I would have to explain what our photographers do today – and why it is impossible to get a decent picture of your friend even if you pay £1,000’. Because photography is understood through a causal relation to its subject, it is always, for us, the record of a moment: that sudden smile, that vanishing embrace, that flicker of a long since dead emotion. Painting aims to capture the sense of time, and to present its subject as extended in time. Portraiture is not an art of the momentary, and the true portraitist paints into the features of his sitter a whole narrative history. The causal relation which fixes the photographic image is a relation between events, and it is only by deserting his craft and taking up a pen, a brush or a pencil, that the photographer can adjust his image so as to break free of the moment. (This is surely what Brady manages in his famous portrait of Queen Emma.)”
― Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture