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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
Free
Idea
Ideas
Chains
Style
Start
Freedom

More quotes by Richard Avedon

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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.
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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One man's fantasy is another man's job.
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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Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
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 am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
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He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
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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A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
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All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
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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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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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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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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People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
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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If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.
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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The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
Richard Avedon