Annie Leibovitz Quotes

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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 ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

A close friend of mine, Annie Leibovitz, who I've known for forty years, photographs celebrities every single day of the week but they all seem to look the same even though she's one of the most creative photographers alive. They all just look the same. Brad Pitt is a great actor but all the pictures of Brad Pitt look the same. ~ Lawrence Schiller

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

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. ~ Annie Leibovitz

Pointing and clicking like Annie Leibovitz ~ Lisi Harrison

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

The surest sign of age is loneliness. ~ Annie Dillard

As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery ... I consider nature's facts
its beautiful and grotesque forms and events
in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. ~ Annie Dillard

This is the book I never read
These are the words I never said
This is the path I'll never tread
These are the dreams I'll dream instead
This is the joy that's seldom spread
These are the tears...
The tears we shed
This is the fear
This is the dread
"These are the contents of my head
And these are the years that we have spent
And this is what they represent
And this is how I feel
Do you know how I feel?"

~Annie Lennox ~ Annie Lennox

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. ~ Annie Dillard

One of my favourite movies is 'Annie Hall' because it's about the silver lining of the break-up. ~ Mike Birbiglia

She was bold, and yet she was reserved. She was sensual and girlish, but she was never coy. So I think that what she projected was a vitality and freshness that for many people came to stand for American womanhood. It's what made American women attractive: that outdoor complexion, that wonderful figure, and yet that carriage, that demureness, that suggested that she was in charge of herself and not to be had. ~ Paul Fees

I was the illegitimate child of the legitimate theater. I had no training. I came from downtown rock and roll, and when I came in and auditioned for the Broadway revival of 'Hair,' I had no eyebrows - kind of a Bowie-esque glimmer kid. And it was hard representing the flower power era when we were stone cold punks. ~ Annie Golden

The first rule of snooping is to come at it sideways
when you began writing me dizzy letters about Alexander, I didn't ask if you were in love with him, I asked what his favorite animal was. And your answer told me everything I needed to know about him
how many men would admit that they loved ducks? ~ Annie Barrows

I took individual photographs of Annie Liebovitz, I kept taking her picture. ~ Shirley Knight

Secretly he was pleased to own a horse with the sand to eat a raw cowboy. ~ Annie Proulx

You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life ~ Woody Allen

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore. ~ Annie Baker

I would love to meet a dodo. ~ Annie Lennox

What we fear we often rage against. ~ Annie Proulx

When the watermelons were as large as a child's head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow. ~ Annie Proulx

I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past. ~ Annie Rogers

I rarely find that things put in quotes, attributed to me, are things that I said -certainly in the context in which they are presented. ~ Annie Potts

I am the flower child who will not wilt. You couldn't have asked for anything more. ~ Annie Golden

Annie Wilkes had her own interior set of rules; in her way she was strangely prim. She had made him drink water from a floor-bucket; had withheld his medication until he was in agony; had made him burn the only copy of his new novel; had hand-cuffed him and stuck a rag reeking of furniture polish in his mouth; but she would not take the money from his wallet. She brought it to him, the old scuffed Lord Buxton he'd had since college, and put it in his hands. All ~ Stephen King

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. ~ Annie Dillard

She's American. She shows her emotions, doesn't hide them and tell you what you want to hear. She behaves genuinely and impulsively. That is part of her appeal. ~ Annie Ward

We still & always want waking. ~ Annie Dillard

If I start to feel run-down or like I'm going to get sick, I know I need sleep - stat. I can sometimes keep a sickness at bay with a good night's sleep! ~ Annie Wersching

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone. Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to ~ Annie Proulx

We often respond to today's world with yesterday's adaptations. (quoting Dan Fesster) ~ Annie Murphy Paul

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues. ~ Annie Dillard

Home is where your story begins. ~ Annie Danielson

I gave a talk on the Brontë girls once when it was my turn to speak. I'm sorry I can't send you my notes on Charlotte and Emily -- I used them to kindle a fire in my stove-- there being no other paper in the house. I'd already burnt up my tide tables, the Book of Revelation and the story about Job. (From Isola Pribby to Juliet) ~ Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

The mental body, like the astral, varies much in different people; it is composed of coarser or of finer matter, according to the needs of the more or less unfolded consciousness connected with it. In the educated it is active and well-defined; in the undeveloped it is cloudy and inchoate. ~ Annie Besant

I am afraid that I think both the near future environmental reality and political landscape are not looking good - and they are connected. The best tool we have for advancing environmental solutions is our democracy, and we can't currently access it because it has been so thoroughly hijacked by big corporate interests. ~ Annie Leonard

It's Annie and me they're all sitting around here like cardboard people judging; It's Annie and me. And what we did that they think is wrong, when you pare it all down, was fall in love. ~ Nancy Garden

Write as if you were dying. ~ Annie Dillard