Annie Leibovitz Quotes

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

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

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

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.

The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.

Nobody takes photographs, photographs take you.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

When I’m photographing I see life.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

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

You can't create a movie as you think about it. And what's in the scene is not what's being seen. A shot always means something other than what it is. All are vehicles. A landscape is just a vehicle. The viewer might think different things, and I'm not going to intervene.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.