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I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

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
People
Stimulated
Photographer
Almost
Ideas
Always
Never

More quotes by 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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All photographs are accurate. None of them is the 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.
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I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.
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If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
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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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The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
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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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
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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
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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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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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Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
Richard Avedon
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To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
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He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
Richard Avedon
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Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
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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A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
Richard Avedon
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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
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