Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon
Richard Avedonwas an American fashion and portrait photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth15 May 1923
CountryUnited States of America
photography wake-up essentials
And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
giving-up soul pieces
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?
photography doctors people
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.
photography facts opinion
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
freedom ideas style
Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
photography art thinking
I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
forever records height
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.
differences people accomplishment
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.
taken hands order
Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I'm holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I'm photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I'm doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I'm photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.
photography photographer made
I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
photography fiction portraits
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
reality people photograph
The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
vanity parent house
My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.