Richard Avedon's Quotes

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.

People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

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?

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

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.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is... the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.