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
difficult be-good hard
It's not hard being great occasionally. It's difficult to be good consistently.
actresses cameras patient
Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I've ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.
facts portraits opinion
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
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.
real expression gestures
You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface-gesture, costume, expression-radically and correctly.
reading ideas excellence
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. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I've lost what's really there been seduced by someone else's standard of beauty or by the sitter's own idea of the best in him. That's not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.
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 kindness mean
I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.
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.
real moving people
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.
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.
photography real doe
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's 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. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.