28 Quotes by Irving Penn

Working on photography is working on oneself.

Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core.

In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it is apparent on the outside...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.

Photographing a cake can be art.

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

I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes.

I can get obsessed by anything if i look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.

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