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.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.

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.

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

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.

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 feel very proud of the work from the ’80s because it is very bright and colorful.

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.

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.

Coming tight was boring to me, just the face… it didn’t have enough information.

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.

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.

I’d like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.

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

What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

It’s hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.

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

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.

At my Rolling Stones’ tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way.

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

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

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.

Computer photography won’t be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical.

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

I don’t think there is anything wrong with white space. I don’t think it’s a problem to have a blank wall.

When you go to take someone’s picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward.

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

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me.

I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

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.

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