Richard Avedon Quotes

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

One man's fantasy is another man's job.

There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my deeper work.

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.

It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.

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?

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

I think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

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.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.