Annie Leibovitz Quotes

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

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.

All you have to do to make something interesting is to look at it long enough.

The beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent.

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

Study the world's skin before you set out to look for its heart.

I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.

It's easy to create something that has a lot of luster, but it's very hard to make something that has a lot of depth.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

A photograph is just a little, teeny-weeny, small piece of life. I feel like I see so much more than what I can actually get.

All things are photographable.

One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message.

I don't trust photographers. I'm now a relaxed, contented 60 year-old, but look at my pictures and you see a crazy, bug-eyed serial killer.

That is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual; the wise man wonders at the usual.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

There's more to life than making shallow, fairly obvious observations.

Mysteries lie all around us, even in the most familiar things, waiting only to be perceived.

My idea being that for the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away. You have to know how to see.

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.