Richard Avedon Quotes
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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.
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Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
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I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
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Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
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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. It's a pleasure to make a living that way. It's pleasure and then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It's not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.
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The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
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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.
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People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
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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.
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I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
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i'm beginning to feel like this. caught the incredible sunshine just in the nick of time today on my walk. the wall of rain approaching from the west desert was pretty spectacular, too. along with being gorgeous, it was sooo muddy. which made driving home in no shoes so very fun :) if only i could post photos here! a picture is worth a thousand words, yes? 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I'm holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I'm photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I'm doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I'm photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.
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Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
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i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
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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.
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It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.
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I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.
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If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
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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.
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Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
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I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
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