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A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed

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
Someone
Photographic
Photographed
Portrait
Portraits
Picture

More quotes by Richard Avedon

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Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
Richard Avedon
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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
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My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Richard Avedon
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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
Richard Avedon
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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
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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.
Richard Avedon
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A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
Richard Avedon
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Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
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I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
Richard Avedon
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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.
Richard Avedon
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I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment
Richard Avedon