A Quote by Sam Abell

Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me. — © Sam Abell
Richard Prince's most famous photograph was made by me.
I find that my entire life has come to me, and things happened without me planning them. You know, I never asked to photograph Princess Diana, and that made me more famous than I wanted. I never asked to photograph Madonna, and that pushed me to another level. There are things that just take you into the limelight.
There are a lot of ways to talk about the life of a photograph. You can talk about the afterlife of a photograph, and in the end I talk about that, with the Richard Prince picture. But mainly, what I dedicated the book to being about was how photographs begin their life, and where they begin it. And they begin it with the photographer's imagination and instinct and experience.
Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to 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.
First of all, I appropriate photographs.In presenting the Richard Prince photograph I tried to be as neutral as I could be. I put down the fact of it. I wanted it to be the same thing he wanted it to be, an open ended invitation to think about authorship, and who owns a created work. So I pair it with my appropriated picture.
I grew up with my grandfather [Elia Kazan] being famous in a way that's not like Beyoncé, but famous in a relative way. It made me feel weird about the way that we treat people that are famous, and it made me feel weird about fame in general.
Historically, actors have been made very famous for roles that were something that was far - - Richard Widmark comes to mind (playing Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death") or something like that, where you do some famous role and everybody imitates you for the rest of your life. But obviously it's much more fun to play something you're not than it is to play something you are.
Oh, my stars! Think about Prince Kai! You could dance with Prince Kai!” This made Cinder pause and squint into Iko’s blinding light. “Why would the prince dance with me?” Iko’s fan hummed as she sought an answer. “Because you won’t have grease on your face this time.
I became an actor, and because I had success as an actor, I became famous. I was acting for quite a while before I got famous; television made me famous. I guess that it's television that is responsible for everybody's desire to be famous.
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.
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 dance had made me the most famous colored woman in the world.
A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.
Branding is everything. A young girl once came up to me and told me I could be famous because I looked just like Richard Branson!
I remember when the photograph was taken. The famous one, I mean. The one of me being rushed from the Boston Marathon bombing without my legs.
I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.
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