84 Best Annie Leibovitz Quotes To Inspire Photographers

Annie Leibovitz Quotes

Annie Leibovitz is an American Photographer born on October 2, 1949, and went to learn Art at San Francisco Art Institute.

She is best known for her Engaging and Famous Portraits of John Lennon, Queen Elizabeth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many more.

Here are some of Annie Leibovitz Inspirational Quotes for Inspiring Photographers and Master Photographers for inspiration. And if you want to be taught by Annie Leibovitz, you can check out her course on Masterclass.

If you love Annie Leibovitz Quotes, you will like Photography Quotes By Famous Photographers like Robert Capa Quotes, Ansel Adams Quotes, Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes, Imogen Cunningham quotes, Robert Frank Quotes and Dorothea Lange Quotes.

Famous Annie Leibovitz Quotes About Photography And Life

Annie Leibovitz is an excellent Portrait photographer who has gone through a lot and has learned a lot. Here are the Best Annie Leibovitz Quotes to get you inspired to take a camera and go out and shoot love and wonders.

1. “Photography is not something you retire from.” ― Annie Leibovitz
2. 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. ― Annie Leibovitz
3. A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people. ― Annie Leibovitz
4. 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
5. 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
6. My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds. ― Annie Leibovitz
7. 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
8. If it makes you cry, it goes in the show. ― Annie Leibovitz
9. A very subtle difference can make the picture or not. ― Annie Leibovitz
10. Those who want to be serious photographers, you’re really going to have to edit your work. You’re going to have to understand what you’re doing. You’re going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do. ― Annie Leibovitz
11. 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
12. When I take a picture, I take 10 percent of what I see. ― Annie Leibovitz
    

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13. I love photography. And I just eat it up. I feel like I’m an encyclopedia, you know, inside. ― Annie Leibovitz
14. 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
15. At my Rolling Stones’ tour, the camera was a protection. I used it in a Zen way. ― Annie Leibovitz
16. 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
17. I feel a responsibility to my backyard. I want it to be taken care of and protected. ― Annie Leibovitz
18. 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
19. I feel very proud of the work from the ’80s because it is very bright and colorful. ― Annie Leibovitz
20. 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
21. I feel more like a creative artist using photography because there’s – the digital work is so interesting now. It’s come to that. I have had many different stages of photography – there are many different ways to take photos. But I feel now I’m in that stage of my life where I use the camera, you know, in that way. ― Annie Leibovitz
22. Lennon was very helpful. What he taught me seems completely obvious: he expected people to treat each other well. ― Annie Leibovitz
23. I’ve learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures. ― Annie Leibovitz
24. 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
25. 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
26. I was with Tom Wolfe at the launch of Apollo 17, which led him to ‘The Right Stuff. ― Annie Leibovitz
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28. I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude. ― Annie Leibovitz
29. I went on tour with the Rolling Stones in 1972 for two or three cities. And in 1975, I was the tour photographer for the Rolling Stones. I hung onto my camera for dear life. Because it scared the hell out of me. ― Annie Leibovitz
30. Computer photography won’t be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical. ― Annie Leibovitz
31. 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
32. 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. ― Annie Leibovitz
33. No one ever thought Clint Eastwood was funny, but he was. ― Annie Leibovitz
34. 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
35. Coming tight was boring to me, just the face… it didn’t have enough information. ― Annie Leibovitz
36. My father was stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, which had a hospital where they brought casualties straight from the battlefield. My mother was kind of a sophisticated bohemian, and my father was in the military to make a living. ― Annie Leibovitz
37. 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. ― Annie Leibovitz
38. I’m more interested in being good than being famous. ― Annie Leibovitz
39. You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth. ― Annie Leibovitz
40. I don’t think there is anything wrong with white space. I don’t think it’s a problem to have a blank wall. ― Annie Leibovitz
41. I don’t think I could give advice to my younger self because she probably wouldn’t listen. ― Annie Leibovitz
42. I’ve never liked the word ‘celebrity.’ I like to photograph people who are good at what they do. ― Annie Leibovitz
43. I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed. ― Annie Leibovitz
44. 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
45. 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
46. 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
47. 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
48. 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
49. I fight to take a good photograph every single time. ― Annie Leibovitz
50. 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
51. It’s hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time. ― Annie Leibovitz
52. There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy. ― Annie Leibovitz
53. I can’t stand the word ‘celebrity.’ It’s such a brash word. ― Annie Leibovitz
54. 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
55. My body was so instrumental to how I took pictures: it was practically a dance. I used to use my legs a lot; now I’m a little more sedentary. ― Annie Leibovitz
56. As I get older, the book projects are – liberating is one word, but they really are me. ― Annie Leibovitz
57. When you go to take someone’s picture, the first thing they say is, what you want me to do? Everyone is very awkward. ― Annie Leibovitz
58. 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
59. I still need the camera because it is the only reason anyone is talking to me. ― Annie Leibovitz
60. As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself. ― Annie Leibovitz
61. I sometimes find the surface interesting. To say that the mark of a good portrait is whether you get them or get the soul – I don’t think this is possible all of the time. ― Annie Leibovitz
62. “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
63. “For me, the story about the pictures is about almost losing myself, and coming back, and what it means to be deeply involved in a subject. The thing that saved me was that I had my camera by my side. It was there to remind me who I was and what I did. It separated me from them.” ― Annie Leibovitz
64. “Things happen in front of you. That’s perhaps the most wonderful and mysterious aspect of photography. It seemed like you just had to decide when and where to aim the camera. The process was linear and it never stopped. That’s still true, although I’ve traded in my need for always taking pictures. I can’t let them go by sometimes now and just be there.” ― Annie Leibovitz
65. “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” ― Annie Leibovitz, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005
66. “Abraham helped build their cabin and split rails for a fence, but he soon left home for good. The log cabin near Decatur was, I learned, the one that went on tour after the assassination. It was dismantled by John Hanks, Lincoln’s second cousin, and taken to Chicago and then to Boston. The last sighting of it, as least as far as we can ascertain, was at P.T. Barnum’s museum in New York. It was apparently lost at sea while being shipped to England.” ― Annie Leibovitz
67. What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not. ― Annie Leibovitz
68. 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. ― Annie Leibovitz
69. I’m a huge, huge fan of photography. I have a small photography collection. As soon as I started to make some money, I bought my very first photograph: an Henri Cartier-Bresson. Then I bought a Robert Frank. ― Annie Leibovitz
70. As much as I’m not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it’s quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you. ― Annie Leibovitz
71. There were some advantages to being a woman photographer. I think women have more empathy with the subject. ― Annie Leibovitz
72. As fantastic as it is to have ‘Vogue’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ as places to work, I don’t often get to shoot the kind of things I like to photograph in the way I like to photograph. ― Annie Leibovitz
73. I was scared when I went to Conde Nast. I had heard horror stories about how they used you up and then spit you out and went on. But there was this great history of photography that had been done there. ― Annie Leibovitz
74. There’s not enough talked about in terms of growing older. You start to lose your body. ― Annie Leibovitz
75. As soon as you put something to bed like the ‘Women’ book, you’re never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph – it’s an endless subject. ― Annie Leibovitz
76. 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
77. I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn’t be an art teacher unless I became an artist first. ― Annie Leibovitz
78. 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
79. 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
80. What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color. ― Annie Leibovitz
81. There certainly are people who are a pain to work with. I’d be crazy to name them. You can’t be indiscreet in this business. ― Annie Leibovitz
82. I try to be home for dinner, but I’m not there enough. I sometimes feel I’m still fumbling, getting it wrong, but I make my way. ― Annie Leibovitz
83. One of the great things about being an older person is that I am very aware of the scope of the work and the historical sense of it. It’s bigger than me. ― Annie Leibovitz
84. I feel unbelievably blessed that I have had the opportunity to photograph Malala in her classroom in Birmingham. ― Annie Leibovitz