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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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Richard Avedon
Age: 81 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 1
Designer
Fashion Photographer
Photographer
New York City
New York
Everyone
Celebrity
Helping
Accomplishment
World
Define
People
Photograph
Difference
Differences
Help
Hope
Photographed

More quotes by 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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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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My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
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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Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
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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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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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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If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
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 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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Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
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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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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I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
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I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
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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To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
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All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon