Quotes About Irving Penn

#1. I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

Mary Ellen Mark

#2. Irving Penn said he didn't want to photograph anyone under 60, and I think there is some truth about it.

Annie Leibovitz

#3. I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me.

Helena Christensen

#4. I dressed all in black and went to see all the top photographers, like Irving Penn, and said, 'I am Veruschka who comes from the border between Russia, Germany and Poland. I'd like to see what you can do with my face.'

Veruschka Von Lehndorff

#5. One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work.

Mary Ellen Mark

#6. I'm not the guy who's afraid of failure. I like to take risks, take the big shot and all that.

Stephen Curry

#7. Sometime in 1964 I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.

Irving Penn

#8. I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Irving Penn

#9. The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.

Irving Penn

#10. You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box.

Chuck D

#11. 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 on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.

Irving Penn

#12. Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

Irving Penn

#13. What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.

Irving Penn

#14. I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

Irving Penn

#15. 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 the world ... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Irving Penn

#16. I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.

Irving Penn

#17. 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, in a word, effective.

Irving Penn

#18. I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes

Irving Penn

#19. George stopped. It was such a short, little question, but she couldn't make her mouth form the sounds.
Mom, what if I'm a girl?

Alex Gino

#20. I watch a man shoot pool for an hour. If he misses more than one shot, I know I can beat him.

Luther Lassiter

#21. Photographing a cake can be art.

Irving Penn

#22. What satellites help to show us is we've actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world ... It's the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.

Sarah Parcak

#23. 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 and children.

Irving Penn

#24. Working on photography is working on oneself.

Irving Penn

#25. The scholar's greatest weakness: calling procrastination research.

Stephen King

#26. 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 than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core.

Irving Penn

#27. We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it.

Michael Medved

#28. 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 print.

Irving Penn

#29. 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 it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.

Irving Penn

#30. A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

Irving Penn