Top 48 Richard Avedon Quotes
#1. A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
#2. 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 I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
Richard Avedon
#3. Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
Richard Avedon
#4. I think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
Richard Avedon
#5. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
Richard Avedon
#6. 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 else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
Richard Avedon
#7. 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.
Richard Avedon
#8. To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
#9. I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.
Richard Avedon
#10. I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us.
Richard Avedon
#11. The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
Richard Avedon
#12. There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.
Richard Avedon
#13. 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?
Richard Avedon
#14. 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 considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.
Richard Avedon
#15. I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense ... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
Richard Avedon
#16. 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.
Richard Avedon
#17. People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.
Richard Avedon
#18. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.
Richard Avedon
#19. 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.
Richard Avedon
#20. Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
Richard Avedon
#21. My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.
Richard Avedon
#22. I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
#23. If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
Richard Avedon
#24. It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.
Richard Avedon
#25. Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I've ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.
Richard Avedon
#26. 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.
Richard Avedon
#27. There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my deeper work.
Richard Avedon
#28. When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes, that werent ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it.
Richard Avedon
#29. Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
Richard Avedon
#30. I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
Richard Avedon
#32. 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 already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.
Richard Avedon
#33. I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.
Richard Avedon
#34. Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
Richard Avedon
#35. 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.
Richard Avedon
#36. 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
Richard Avedon
#38. 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.
Richard Avedon
#39. Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring ... and I've already ... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with.
Richard Avedon
#40. I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
#41. How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.
Richard Avedon
#42. My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Richard Avedon
#43. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
#44. People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
Richard Avedon
#45. You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface-gesture, costume, expression-radically and correctly.
Richard Avedon
#47. 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.
Richard Avedon
#48. I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
Richard Avedon
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