Richard Avedon Quotes

53 quotes in 780 categories

• I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
• All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
• Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
• The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
• To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
• I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
• My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
• I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember…
• I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
• 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…
• A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part…
• A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone…
• Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was…
• For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that's-she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when…
• I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is…
• There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it.…
• 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…
• And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though…
• 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…
• There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates…

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