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

Richard Avedon

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Richard Avedon
Age: 81 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 1
Designer
Fashion Photographer
Photographer
New York City
New York
Truly
Ability
Think
Thinking
People
Charm
Interested

More quotes by Richard Avedon

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I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment
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Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
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Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
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People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
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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.
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If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
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To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
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The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
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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.
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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.
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A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
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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.
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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.
Richard Avedon