Richard Avedon Quotes

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?

I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people

People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

I've photographed just about everyone in the world. But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.

The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE

It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.

It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

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.

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.

He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.

One man's fantasy is another man's job.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.

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.