Annie Leibovitz

“It's hard to watch something go on and be talking at the same time.”

“I fight to take a good photograph every single time.”

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

“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.”

“As I get older, the book projects are - liberating is one word, but they really are me.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.”

“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.”

“There must be a reason why photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I think we get lazy.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”