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

Categorized in : Way Important Fashion

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

Richard Avedon

cameras photography people

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

Richard Avedon

artist people art

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

wake-up essentials photography

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

portraits photography facts

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

doctors photography people

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

Richard Avedon

cameras photography inspirational

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

pieces giving-up soul

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.

Richard Avedon

style freedom ideas

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

wine night children

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

Richard Avedon

hate eye wish

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

narrative light white

It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.

Richard Avedon

hard difficult be-good

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

portraits cameras way

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

Richard Avedon

opinion photography facts

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

Richard Avedon

levels photographer art

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

Richard Avedon

photography giving character

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

Richard Avedon

photography art thinking

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

writing mean lying

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

portraits photography real

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed

Richard Avedon

portraits knows