Quotes from Richard Avedon

How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? 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.

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

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.

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.

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

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

A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring... and I've already... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with.

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.

If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.

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

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

I believe that you've got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.

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

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

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.