Irving Penn's Quotes

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.

I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That's the curse of being a photographer.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Photographing a cake can be art.

The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.

I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.

Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.

Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print.

Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.