Top 40 Richard Avedon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not hard being great occasionally. It’s difficult to be good consistently.”

— Richard Avedon

2. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

4. “Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.”

— Richard Avedon

5. “All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

— Richard Avedon

6. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

7. “Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.”

— Richard Avedon

8. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

9. “He sleeps fastest who sleeps alone.”

— Richard Avedon

10. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

12. “I’ve worked out of a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.”

— Richard Avedon

13. “One man’s fantasy is another man’s job.”

— Richard Avedon

14. “We all perform. It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be. – PERFORMANCE.”

— Richard Avedon

15. “The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

17. “A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion – an occasion rather than a truth.”

— Richard Avedon

18. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

19. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

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

— Richard Avedon

21. “I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.”

— Richard Avedon

22. “A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed.”

— Richard Avedon

23. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

24. “There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person.”

— Richard Avedon

25. “People – running from unhappiness, hiding in power – are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.”

— Richard Avedon

26. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

27. “I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment.”

— Richard Avedon

28. “Faces are the ledgers of our experience.”

— Richard Avedon

29. “I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn’t look like that guy in the pictures.”

— Richard Avedon

30. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

31. “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?”

— Richard Avedon

32. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

33. “Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.”

— Richard Avedon

34. “I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.”

— Richard Avedon

35. “I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.”

— Richard Avedon

36. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

37. “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.”

— Richard Avedon

38. “I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.”

— Richard Avedon

39. “When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes, that werent ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it.”

— Richard Avedon

40. “I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.”

— Richard Avedon

41. “I believe that you’ve got to love your work so much that it is all you want to do.”

— Richard Avedon

42. “If I could do what I want with my eyes alone, I would be happy.”

— Richard Avedon

43. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

44. “How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? 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.”

— Richard Avedon

45. “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.”

— Richard Avedon

46. “My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.”

— Richard Avedon