Richard Avedon Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Richard Avedon

  Freedom, Ideas, Style

  50 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Art, Artist, People

  64 Copy quote

• All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

  Richard Avedon

  Inspirational, Photography, Cameras

  "Richard Avedon and Photo Booth’s New Look" by Maria Lokke, www.newyorker.com. September 11, 2012.

  75 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Facts, Portraits

  "ART; In the Portrait Game, the Photographer Wins" by Vicki Goldberg, www.nytimes.com. March 13, 1994.

  47 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, People, Cameras

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  75 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Difficult, Be Good, Hard

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Wake Up, Essentials

  65 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Doctors, People

  58 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Portraits, Facts, Opinion

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving Up, Soul, Pieces

  "Picture of the week: Women, by Richard Avedon" by Hannah Booth, www.theguardian.com. September 20, 2013.

  49 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Art, Levels, Photographer

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Moving, People

  9 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Hate, Eye, Wish

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, White, Narrative

  33 Copy quote

• 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 the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn't photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.

  Richard Avedon

  Children, Wine, Night

  44 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Thinking, Sometimes, Predicaments

  20 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Ideas, People, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Facts, Opinion

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  Cameras, Portraits, Way

  15 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Art, Thinking

  29 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Believe, Love You, Want

  7 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Reality, People, Photographer

  6 Copy quote

• 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 a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

  Richard Avedon

  Photography, Character, Giving

  30 Copy quote

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

  Richard Avedon

  Artist, Photographer, Wanted

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Richard Avedon

  Lying, Writing, Mean

  24 Copy quote

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