Annie Leibovitz Quotes

“The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”

— Annie Leibovitz

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.

— Annie Leibovitz

“There's an idea that it's hard to be a woman artist. People assume that women have fewer opportunities, less power. But it's not any harder to be a woman artist than to be a male artist. We all take what we are given and use the parts of ourselves that feed the work. We make our way. Photographers, men and women, are particularly lucky. Photography lets you find yourself. It is a passport to people and places and to possibilities.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“Everyone keeps asking you for pictures, and after a while you get tired of that. I always say, They are in the archives.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“What I learned from Lennon was something that did stay with me my whole career, which is to be very straightforward. I actually love talking about taking pictures, and I think that helps everyone.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“It's a heavy weight, the camera. Now we have modern and lightweight, small plastic cameras, but in the '70s they were heavy metal.”

— Annie Leibovitz

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.

— Annie Leibovitz

I went to Yosemite as an homage to Ansel Adams. I could never be Ansel Adams, but to know that's there for us - there's so much for us in this country.

— Annie Leibovitz

“When I started working for Rolling Stone, I became very interested in journalism and thought maybe that's what I was doing, but it wasn't true. What became important was to have a point of view.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“No one ever thought Clint Eastwood was funny, but he was.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.”

— Annie Leibovitz

I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.

— Annie Leibovitz

“I fight to take a good photograph every single time.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“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.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.”

— Annie Leibovitz

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.

— Annie Leibovitz

“What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“I shoot a little bit, maybe two rolls, medium format, which is 20 pictures, and if it's not working, I change the position.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.”

— Annie Leibovitz

As I get older, the book projects are - liberating is one word, but they really are me.

— Annie Leibovitz

“I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.”

— Annie Leibovitz

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.

— Annie Leibovitz

One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time.

— Annie Leibovitz

“Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we're really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that's when you start taking pictures.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“Photography's like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It's always hungry.”

— Annie Leibovitz

A photograph is just a tiny slice of a subject. A piece of them in a moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more than that.

— Annie Leibovitz

“A lot can be told from what happens in between the main moments.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“Most people, especially successful people, are hard-working. They want to participate. They want to do things well.”

— Annie Leibovitz

I've said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is to stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the people who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don't know as much about. Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I'm really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you

— Annie Leibovitz

“The subjects felt more comfortable if they played the role than if they had to be themselves.”

— Annie Leibovitz

Things happen in front of you. That's perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography.

— Annie Leibovitz

In this day and age of things moving so, so fast, we still long for things to stop, and we as a society love the still image. Every time there is some terrible or great moment, we remember the stills.

— Annie Leibovitz

“I've always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market.”

— Annie Leibovitz

“The first thing I did with my very first camera was climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing Mt. Fuji is a lesson in determination and moderation. It would be fair to ask if I took the moderation part to heart. But it certainly was a lesson in respecting your camera. If I was going to live with this thing, I was going to have to think about what that meant. There were not going to be any pictures without it.”

— Annie Leibovitz

My early childhood equipped me really well for my portrait work: The quick encounter, where you are not going to know the subject for very long. These days I am much more comfortable with the fifteen minute relationship, than I am with a life long relationship.

— Annie Leibovitz

“When you involve people, they come out, you see them, you get to see their sense of humor.”

— Annie Leibovitz

All dancers are, by and large, a photographer's dream. They communicate with their bodies and they are trained to be completely responsive to a collaborative situation.

— Annie Leibovitz

“I love having the photograph in my hand. I love looking at the photograph. I love looking at a box of photographs. I just love the still photograph.”

— Annie Leibovitz