Richard Avedon quotes

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. (Richard Avedon)
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
Richard Avedon
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
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.
Richard Avedon
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon
Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. 'Lying' is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
Richard Avedon
Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
Richard Avedon
I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.
Richard Avedon
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
Richard Avedon
People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion. (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
If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?
Richard Avedon
Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
Richard Avedon
I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
Richard Avedon
I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
Richard Avedon
Faces are the ledgers of our experience.
Richard Avedon
My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.
Richard Avedon
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
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
Just advertising departments with legs and high heels. (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
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