Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Full
Readings
Reading
Clues
Faith
Surfaces
Anything
Clue
Great
Photographs
Good
Photographer
Photograph
Surface
More quotes by Richard Avedon
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
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
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
To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.
Richard Avedon
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
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
People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
Richard Avedon
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
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
Richard Avedon
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
Richard Avedon
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
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
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
Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
Richard Avedon
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
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
I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.
Richard Avedon
One man's fantasy is another man's job.
Richard Avedon
Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.
Richard Avedon
