Richard Avedon

“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...”

“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 -...”

“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 f...”

“Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring... and I've already... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know wha...”

“My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.”

“Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.”

“Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.”

“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 lo...”

“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.”

“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 large...”

“Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.”

“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.”

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

“People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.”

“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?”

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

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

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