Richard Avedon People Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

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.