Top 116 Quotes & Sayings by Annie Leibovitz
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Annie Leibovitz.
Last updated on November 26, 2024.
Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.
When you go to take someone's picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward.
I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.
If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.
There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject.
I'm more interested in being good than being famous.
Those who want to be serious photographers, you're really going to have to edit your work. You're going to have to understand what you're doing. You're going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.
I wish that all of nature's magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.
I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.
No one ever thought Clint Eastwood was funny, but he was.
When you are younger, the camera is like a friend and you can go places and feel like you're with someone, like you have a companion.
The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.
I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul - I don't think this is possible all of the time.
There are still so many places on our planet that remain unexplored. I'd love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.
It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.
I went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972 for two or three cities. And in 1975, I was the tour photographer for the Rolling Stones. I hung onto my camera for dear life. Because it scared the hell out of me.
At my Rolling Stones' tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way.
I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.
Coming tight was boring to me, just the face... it didn't have enough information.
I fight to take a good photograph every single time.
I'm a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank.
When you are on assignment, film is the least expensive thing in a very practical sense. Your time, the person's time, turns out to be the most valuable thing.
As much as I'm not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it's quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you.
As a young person, and I know it's hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn't do normally if I was just by myself.
My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.
A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.
I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.
I fell in love with the darkroom, and that was part of being a photographer at the time. The darkroom was unbelievably sexy. I would spend all night in the darkroom.
I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.
There's not enough talked about in terms of growing older. You start to lose your body.
I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn't be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.
A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.
I feel very proud of the work from the '80s because it is very bright and colorful.
I feel unbelievably blessed that I have had the opportunity to photograph Malala in her classroom in Birmingham.
I don't think I could give advice to my younger self because she probably wouldn't listen.
If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.
My body was so instrumental to how I took pictures: it was practically a dance. I used to use my legs a lot; now I'm a little more sedentary.
It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.
Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.
The pictures of my family were designed to be on a family wall, they were supposed to be together. It was supposed to copy my mother's wall in her house.
I didn't want to let women down. One of the stereotypes I see breaking is the idea of aging and older women not being beautiful.
When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
I don't think there is anything wrong with white space. I don't think it's a problem to have a blank wall.
The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!
As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.
Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives.
I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.
What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.
I was scared when I went to Conde Nast. I had heard horror stories about how they used you up and then spit you out and went on. But there was this great history of photography that had been done there.
When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.
As I get older, the book projects are - liberating is one word, but they really are me.
Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.
You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.
There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.
I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism.
I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there's - the digital work is so interesting now. It's come to that. I have had many different stages of photography - there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I'm in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way.
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