Avedon's Words

I just came across this amazing quotation from Richard Avedon in the December Issue of Vanity Fair. The article, The Now of Avedon, recounts the creation of the April 1965 issue of Harper's Bazaar with him as the guest editor and sole photographer.

"I come to a sitting so charged with what I want out of the sitting, before it begins, that I'm almost sick before I start it," he said in February 1965. "I know what I have to accomplish has to be done on my shoulders – I have to make it happen."

"If I can't make that happen," he went on years later, "if I'm low, if the day is wrong, if something in the studio irritates me, then the fear comes over me.... I'm scared, like an athlete gets scared: You're going to try for the high jump, you could blow it. That's exactly what taking a photograph is like... Most people don't come back again. Most people come [for one sitting], and I have to pull it out of myself and out of them."