Quotes from Richard Avedon

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

Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.

One man's fantasy is another man's job.

People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.

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.

All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.

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

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. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

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 he's wearing or how he looks.

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.

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

There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my deeper work.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

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?

He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.

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.

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.