Annie Leibovitz

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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