Richard Avedon Quotes

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It's closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn't need a caption; it should already convey an idea.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

You see someone like maybe William Eggleston. William doesn't even really talk about what he does; he just wants to make these images. He kind of hovers around a location and extracts these images.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Photography appears to be an easy activity; in fact it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is in the instrument.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.

it's not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.