Richard Avedon Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”
-- Richard AvedonSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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“To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
-- Richard AvedonSource : "Richard Avedon and Photo Booth’s New Look" by Maria Lokke, www.newyorker.com. September 11, 2012.
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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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“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 AvedonSource : "Picture of the week: Women, by Richard Avedon" by Hannah Booth, www.theguardian.com. September 20, 2013.
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“I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“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. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I've lost what's really there been seduced by someone else's standard of beauty or by the sitter's own idea of the best in him. That's not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed”
-- Richard Avedon -
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“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people”
-- Richard Avedon -
“Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I'm holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I'm photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I'm doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I'm photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.”
-- Richard Avedon -
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“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 -
“My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“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 -
“For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that's-she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn't photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.”
-- Richard Avedon -
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“Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's 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. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.”
-- 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 -
“I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.”
-- 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 -
“I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.”
-- Richard AvedonSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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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 -
“I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.”
-- Richard Avedon -
“There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.”
-- Richard Avedon -
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“There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it. It's a pleasure to make a living that way. It's pleasure and then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It's not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.”
-- 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
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