Richard Avedon Quotes

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

This prolific and inventive photographer (Edward Steichen) must be given credit for virtually inventing modern fashion photography, and as the tohousands of high-quality original prints in the Conde Nast archives prove, only Irving Penn and Richard Avedon have since emerged as serious historical rivals. ~ William A. Ewing

There's a really brilliant photographer who's deceased who in my sort of fashion and modelling days, I was fortunate enough to get to work with before he passed away, but Richard Avedon was utterly genius and creatively brilliant. ~ Gabriel Mann

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph. ~ Richard Avedon

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

I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing. ~ Cary Fukunaga

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

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

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. ~ Richard Avedon

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people. ~ Richard Avedon

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

Richard Avedon taught me that if you go into a photo session and come out with what you had hoped for, it's a failure. You need to be surprised if you want it to be magical. ~ Amy Arbus

It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me. ~ Richard Avedon

Maybe there's some kind of modeling that can be tedious, like catalogue modeling, but there's a kind of modeling, with runways or working with Richard Avedon, that's not very far from acting. Besides the fact that you don't have a partner to react to, the body language is the same. ~ Isabella Rossellini

I've photographed just about everyone in the world. But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again. ~ Richard Avedon

Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I've ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it. ~ Richard Avedon

Anna Wintour hadn't been to any of McQueen's shows, and McQueen didn't like it. McQueen said American Vogue could borrow the dress only if they flew it to New York and back, in its own seat, with an escort. It was a fuck-you and they took it, and the dress was shot by Richard Avedon. "Fashion people haven't got any brains," McQueen said. ~ Maureen Callahan

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels. ~ Richard Avedon

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

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

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. ~ Richard Avedon

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas. ~ Richard Avedon

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

One man's fantasy is another man's job. ~ Richard Avedon

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. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I've lost what's really there been seduced by someone else's standard of beauty or by the sitter's own idea of the best in him. That's not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest. ~ Richard Avedon

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. ~ Richard Avedon

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. ~ Richard Avedon

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. ~ Richard Avedon

He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone. ~ Richard Avedon

Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. ~ Richard Avedon

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

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. ~ Richard Avedon

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

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. ~ Richard Avedon

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

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. ~ Richard Avedon

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

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

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

I felt like I was in the best photography school in the world - I had Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn teach me. ~ Helena Christensen

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 ~ Richard Avedon

Faces are the ledgers of our experience. ~ Richard Avedon

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer. ~ Richard Avedon

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

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

Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring ... and I've already ... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with. ~ Richard Avedon

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

We need a revolution in academia, with every social science attempting to
understand the causes of happiness. ~ Richard Layard

Montjoy, the French herald, comes to the English king under a flag of truce and asks that they be permitted to bury their dead and "Sort our nobles from our common men; For many of our princes (wo the while!) Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes." (Henry V., Act 4, Sc. 7.) With equal courtesy Richard III., on Bosworth field, speaks of his opponents to the gentlemen around him: "Remember what you are to cope withal - A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways, A scum of Bretagne and base lackey peasants." (Act 5, Sc. 3.) ~ William Shakespeare

A living. Without Jonny, Student almost fell to pieces. ~ Richard Branson

Before sequels became the most reliable way to make a buck, Bond set the standard for lavish serial adventures. Before Hollywood found gold in multimillion-dollar adaptations of comic-book characters - in the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man blockbusters - Bond was the movies' first big-budget franchise superhero. ~ Richard Corliss

Hendrix was the bass player for Little Richard. We were both left-handed, but we would use a right-handed guitar held upside down and backwards. He developed my slides and my riffs. In fact he used to say, and this is documented, 'I patterned my style after Dick Dale.' ~ Dick Dale

They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope thay had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm. ~ Richard Bachman

[T]his is the strongest encouragement to them in sinning; and we have need to lay all our batteries against this bulwark of presumption (361). ~ Richard Baxter

Get up with the alarm, shower, get dressed, and have breakfast. Without much effort, you've already put yourself in a good position for the rest of the day. If you have to struggle to get out of bed and decide every single day about showering and breakfast and what to wear, you've put yourself in a depleted state before the day has really started. The person who's taking care of herself without thinking about it, getting to work on time without procrastinating, has much more will power left in reserve when important decisions come up. This is why people with high self-control consistently report less stress in their lives; they use their will power to take care of business semiautomatically, so they have fewer crises and calamities. When there is a real crisis, they have plenty of discipline left in reserve. ~ Richard O'Connor

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives. ~ Richard Mabey

I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. ~ Richard Dawkins

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write. ~ Richard Flanagan

Hawai'i is the only place in the fifty states where you can see the stars of the entire northern and southern hemispheres. Here, stars that can't be seen from the mainland are visible, along with stars that aren't visible from Australia. ~ John Richard Stephens

Every veil secretly desires to be lifted, except the veil of Hypocrisy. ~ Richard B. Garnett

I've never sued anybody, though there have been one or two occasions I've wanted to strangle one or two people. ~ Richard Branson

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear. ~ Richard Dawkins

Must I go to turn to my Bible to shew a preacher where it is written, that a man's soul is more worth than a world, much more than a hundred pounds a year; much more are many souls worth? or that both we and that we have are God's, and should be employed to the utmost for His service? or that it is inhuman cruelty to let many souls go to hell, for fear my wife and children should live somewhat harder, or live at a lower rate, when according to God's ordinary way of working by means, I might do much to prevent their misery, if I would but a little displease my flesh, which all that are Christ's have crucified with its lusts? ~ Richard Baxter

There can hardly, I believe, be imagined a more desirable pleasure than that of praise unmixed with any possibility of flattery. ~ Richard Steele

I believe that in spite of the chains we bind ourselves with, there's a primordial section of the human psyche that is still nomadic and still yearns to roam free. ~ Richard Paul Evans

My father, unusually for a PoW, talked about his experiences, but he talked about them in a very limited way. ~ Richard Flanagan

I was surfing the Internet, and I came across a school in Atlanta where you could learn how to climb trees with ropes the way the pros do. It sounded terrific, and so I went down there, and I began to learn these kind of rarified techniques for how you get up and down trees while using special ropes and gear. ~ Richard Preston

In Russia's case he identifies three strands: the Atlanticists, favouring alignment with the United States and the West (the bandwagoners); the imperialists, who favour the reassertion of Russia's power in opposition to the West (the balancers); and the neo-Slavophiles, sharing the sentiments of the imperialists but who stress the development of the country's Slavic identity.8 According to Zimmerman, the fundamental divide is indeed between Westernisers and Slavophiles, in a reprise of nineteenth-century debates, with the Slavophiles intent on counterbalancing American hegemony and finding an autonomous developmental path.9 ~ Richard Sakwa

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made. ~ Richard Handler

I talk a big game because I carry a big stick. ~ Richard Sherman

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion. ~ Richard Dawkins

It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone. It ~ Richard Wright

The journey from not knowing to knowing was his work. He was selling his desire to learn about a subject. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

ISIS is in many ways a creation of the Syrian regime. ~ Richard Engel

Ultimately we may not be able to alter the struggles our friends, families, and fellow citizens face. But our faith in God's ability to heal all of us in the face of tragedy should not be underestimated. The model Jesus left us is one of love and ministry, of touching others' lives and bringing emotional, physical and spiritual healing ~ Richard E. Dodge

Know why transparency's a beautiful thing? Transparency means no shame. ~ Richard Castle

You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don't live in a democracy. Remember, they're princesses. ~ Richard Corliss

I don't think about growing old," she said.
"I know you don't. That's one of the things I admire about you, Alice. You have some kind of boundless faith in the future. You never give up."
"I suppose I'm an optimist. ~ Richard Yates

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. ~ Richard Dawkins

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world. ~ Richard Peck

As the sun sinks
It casts that silver bridge
Across the lake ~ Richard L. Ratliff

Abortion ... interferes with God's plan-a plan He willed before He created the universe. ~ Richard Halverson

The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ... ~ Richard Preston

Life without Love is as a flower without fragrance. ~ Richard B. Garnett

It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation. ~ Richard Steele

Good drawing is not copying the surface. It has to do with understanding and expression. We don't want to learn to draw just to end up being imprisoned in showing off our knowledge of joints and muscles. We want to get the kind of reality that a camera can't get. We want to accentuate and suppress aspects of the model's character to make it more vivid. ~ Richard Williams

I would say that I was without faith, but no one is truly faithless; they just have faith in the wrong things: fear and defeat. ~ Richard Paul Evans

You smoke?"
"Smoke? Do I look like a fucking idiot? ~ Richard K. Morgan

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store. ~ Michael Gambon

It is through the repeated process of feeling impressions, recording them, and obeying them that one learns to depend on the direction of the Spirit more than on communication through the other five senses. ~ Richard G. Scott