Annie Leibovitz

“I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bough...”

“I feel very proud of the work from the '80s because it is very bright and colorful.”

“When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.”

“What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.”

“What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.”

“In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.”

“My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.”

“I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.”

“I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there's - the digital work is so interesting now. It's come to that. I have had many different stages of photography - there are...”

“A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.”

“I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.”

“Those who want to be serious photographers, you're really going to have to edit your work. You're going to have to understand what you're doing. You're going to have to not just shoot, shoot...”

“I love photography. And I just eat it up. I feel like I'm an encyclopedia, you know, inside.”

“You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.”

“I fight to take a good photograph every single time.”

“I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it's not working, I change the position.”

“I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unle...”

“I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of...”

“Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well.”

“The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”