Richard Avedon Quotes

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

I like photography as a recording device. It's the best possible two-dimensional representation of 3D living things that we have.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.

The moment when I press the shutter is fantastic, orgasmic, so charged with the hope that this will be a great, original, interesting, and perfectly composed photo. But like any other exciting thing in life, it is usually spoiled by some ridiculous, unpredictable, and annoying detail.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

I can't say what makes a picture. I can't say. It's mysterious.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

And that desire-the strong desire to take pictures-is important. It borders on a need, based on a habit: the habit of seeing. Whether working or not, photographers are looking, seeing, and thinking about what they see, a habit that is both a pleasure and a problem, for we seldom capture in a single photograph the full expression of what we see and feel. It is the hope that we might express ourselves fully-and the evidence that other photographers have done so-that keep us taking pictures.

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

A photograph comes into being, as it is seen, all at once.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.