Richard Avedon Quotes & Sayings

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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'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.”

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