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 people portraits
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.
way cameras portraits
The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about.
facts portraits opinion
A portrait isn't a fact but an opinion - an occasion rather than a truth.
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.
portraits knows
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
photography facts portraits
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.
photography people portraits
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
american-photographer concern consider human pictures simply
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.
picks
Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
deeper knocking
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.
face work
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.
adorable album children ends family good guy next pictures screaming
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.
american-photographer art
I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
photography running trying
It's in trying to direct the traffic between Artiface [sic] and Candor, without being run over, that I'm confronted with the questions about photography that matter most to me.