Quote

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

Richard Avedon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Avedon
Age: 81 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 1
Designer
Fashion Photographer
Photographer
New York City
New York
Cameras
Photograph
Photography
People
Snapshots
Portraits
Photographer

More quotes by Richard Avedon

Image
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
Image
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
Image
He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
Richard Avedon
Image
i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
Richard Avedon
Image
People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
Richard Avedon
Image
If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
Richard Avedon
Image
To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
Image
Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.
Richard Avedon
Image
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
Image
One man's fantasy is another man's job.
Richard Avedon
Image
I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.
Richard Avedon
Image
Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
Richard Avedon
Image
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
Image
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
Image
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
Richard Avedon
Image
Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
Richard Avedon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
Image
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon