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.
Fashion passes, but style remains.
In a long meter hymn, a singer - they call it 'lays out a line.' And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can't wedge a pin between it.
There's just certain styles of playing that you do play in your own way. Maybe it's in the way your fingers bend, for all I know. And so whenever you pick up the guitar it's not so much the sound of the instrument itself, it's like the ting that you add onto it-the attitude.
A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.
But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.
I'm always terrified when I'm writing.
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