Quotes by Richard Avedon

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

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

“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.”

“Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.”

“Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is... the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”

“I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.”

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.

We all perform. Its what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. Its a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what wed like to be.--PERFORMANCE

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what hes wearing or how he looks.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

I hate cameras. They interfere, theyre always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.

“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. ”