Quote

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

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
Photographer
Called
Artist
Wanted
Never

More quotes by Richard Avedon

Image
He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
Richard Avedon
Image
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
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
The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
Richard Avedon
Image
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
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
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
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 always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment
Richard Avedon
Image
Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
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
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
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'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
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
Image
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
Richard Avedon
Image
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
Image
One man's fantasy is another man's job.
Richard Avedon
Image
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
Richard Avedon