Richard Avedon

There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it. It's a pleasure to make a living that way. It's pleasure and then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits. It's not important what I consider myself to be, but I consider myself to be a portrait photographer.

I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.

Photography has always reminded me of the second child.. trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn't really considered an art.. that it was considered a craft.. has trapped almost every serious photographer.

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

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

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 larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. She understood photography, and she also understood what makes a great photograph. She related to it as if she were giving a performance. She gave more to the still camera than any actress-any woman- I've ever photographed.

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

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