28 Quotes by Irving Penn

The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.

I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes

Sometime in 1964 I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.

I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.

The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.