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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
Stimulated
Photographer
Almost
Ideas
Always
Never
People

More quotes by 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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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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To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
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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.
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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Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
Richard Avedon
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All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
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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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
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He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
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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i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
Richard Avedon
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I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment
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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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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People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
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
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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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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