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

Richard Avedon Quotes

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

— Richard Avedon

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.

— Richard Avedon

I believe that you’ve got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.

— 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

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.

— Richard Avedon

Reading

One man’s fantasy is another man’s job.

— 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

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

We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be. – PERFORMANCE.

— Richard Avedon

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment.

— Richard Avedon

If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.

— Richard Avedon

When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

— Richard Avedon

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

— Richard Avedon

When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes, that werent ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it.

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

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

— 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

He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.

— Richard Avedon

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person.

— Richard Avedon

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