Annie Leibovitz

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

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

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

I can't stand the word 'celebrity.' It's such a brash word.

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.

I love photography. And I just eat it up. I feel like I'm an encyclopedia, you know, inside.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude.

I've never liked the word 'celebrity.' I like to photograph people who are good at what they do.

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

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.

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.

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

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.