Irving Penn Quotes

19 quotes in 296 categories

• Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world…
• A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
• Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer…
• I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife…
• Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect…
• Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her.…
• I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.
• I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but…
• Photographing a cake can be art.
• I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes
• In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is…
• Working on photography is working on oneself.
• Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn…
• A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is,…
• Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to…
• What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.
• Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.
• I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.
• The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

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