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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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Richard Avedon
Age: 81 †
Born: 1923
Born: May 15
Died: 2004
Died: October 1
Designer
Fashion Photographer
Photographer
New York City
New York
Freedom
Free
Idea
Ideas
Chains
Style
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More quotes by 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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To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
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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All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
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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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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I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment
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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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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Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
Richard Avedon
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Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
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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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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A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
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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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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I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon