Annie Leibovitz

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, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.

I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.

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

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

The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.

A lot can be told from what happens in between the main moments.

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

There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject.

I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself.

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.

There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.

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

As you get older, you have different tools, and you learn to use photography differently.

What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.

My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.

I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.

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 reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.

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