A Quote by Richard Avedon

I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I am sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he.. or even I.. wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.
If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.
As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.
How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
One day the photograph is going to become even more important than it is now.... But I am not particularly an advocate of the photograph.
The photograph is a tool used to take you back to a certain point in one's life, to remember a face or a place you once stood. I feel there is always something quite melancholic about a photograph.
What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.
I always wanted to make an abstract photograph. I would photograph walls, sports interiors, marks on the walls people made. Even looking back it makes so much sense. It's like it was a fight against the photograph.
A photograph never grows old. You and I change, people change all through the months and years but a photograph always remains the same. How nice to look at a photograph of mother or father taken many years ago. You see them as you remember them. But as people live on, they change completely. That is why I think a photograph can be kind.
I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.
When you finish a record, I look at it like a photograph. It's already taken. You got it the way you wanted it to be. You edit it, make sure the light and contrast are right, then you just put it away, and that's your photograph. Then you don't really think about it anymore.
A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go.
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
No amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph.
A photograph has no value unless it looks exactly like a photograph and nothing else.
I think I am most fond of the unseen part. I mean that the various cultural experiences that I go through, and the behavioral aspects of getting the work done, are just as important as the installation and the photograph. So, for me, the relationship between the two is more about hybridism and the search for an ideal form that I'm never going to arrive at. The installation and the photograph are mere approximations of this ideal.
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