Annie Leibovitz Quotes

There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

I've always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market.

I've said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don't know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I'm really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you

All dancers are, by and large, a photographer's dream. They communicate with their bodies and they are trained to be completely responsive to a collaborative situation.

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.

When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

In this day and age of things moving so, so fast, we still long for things to stop, and we as a society love the still image. Every time there is some terrible or great moment, we remember the stills.

I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can't.

When you involve people, they come out, you see them, you get to see their sense of humor.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

Most people, especially successful people, are hard-working. They want to participate. They want to do things well.

When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.

It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.

When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't true. What became important was to have a point of view.

When I was younger I did things with a camera I would not do by myself. I went down to the docks in San Francisco and asked a fisherman if he would take me out on his boat. I would never do that without a camera.

Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.

I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.

I was out there with the White House press squad, and after his helicopter took off, and the carpet rolled up ... This wasn't a photograph that others were taking, but I continued to take pictures.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well.

I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it's not working, I change the position.

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

I gave up on being a journalist - I thought having a point of view was more important than being objective.

As I get older, the book projects are - liberating is one word, but they really are me.

Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.

When I'm asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved. It is work. But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical. The work prepares you for that moment. Suddenly the clouds roll in and the soft light you longed for appears.

As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.

There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.

I'm pretty used to people not liking having their picture taken. I mean, if you do like to have your picture taken, I worry about you.

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

At my Rolling Stones' tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way.

As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.

There are still so many places on our planet that remain unexplored. I'd love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me - that I wasn't to alter it or tamper with it - that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can't help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity.

A lot can be told from what happens in between the main moments.

Abraham helped build their cabin and split rails for a fence, but he soon left home for good. The log cabin near Decatur was, I learned, the one that went on tour after the assassination. It was dismantled by John Hanks, Lincoln's second cousin, and taken to Chicago and then to Boston. The last sighting of it, as least as far as we can ascertain, was at P.T. Barnum's museum in New York. It was apparently lost at sea while being shipped to England.

Coming tight was boring to me, just the face ... it didn't have enough information.

I'd like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.

When you go to take someone's picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward.

What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.

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

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.

I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.

I don't try to overintellectua lize my concepts of people. In fact, the ideas I have, if you talk about them, they seem extremely corny and it's only in their execution that people can enjoy them ... It's something I've learned to trust: The stupider it is, the better it looks.

I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me.

No one ever thought Clint Eastwood was funny, but he was.

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom.

My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.

What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.