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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the distinction between commercial fashion work and the artist's true passion for portrait photography.
Richard Avedon reflects on the duality of his career by recognizing how fashion provides financial benefits while expressing a deeper artistic satisfaction derived from portrait photography. He suggests that while both hold value, it is the personal connection to his art that defines his identity as a photographer.
In practice
In a discussion on the impact of commercial success in art.
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.
When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.
I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
A songwriter's supreme challenge is being complex and simple at the same time
The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.
Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.
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