"My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph"

Avedon points to the inescapable subjectivity at the heart of portraiture. A portrait does not simply capture a person; it crystallizes a photographer’s temperament, obsessions, and values through a cascade of decisions, whom to photograph, how to light, where to place, what to ask, when to click, how to crop. His stark white backgrounds, the confrontational stance, the insistence on the sitter’s steady gaze turn people into mirrors for his preoccupations: vulnerability under glamour, the performance of identity, the fault line between public image and private fragility. What appears as revelation about the sitter is simultaneously revelation about the maker, his appetite for intensity, his skepticism of facades, his taste for drama stripped of ornament.

The claim also folds in the power dynamics of the photographic encounter. Avedon orchestrated sessions like theater, provoking, exhausting, seducing, or unsettling subjects until something he recognized appeared. That “something” is less a universal truth than a pattern consistent with his worldview. Consider In the American West: the monumental scale, the dust, the stare. Admirers see an unflinching American epic; critics see aestheticized hardship and authorial projection. Both readings locate the author at the center. Even selection is a self-portrait: of all the faces in the world, these are the ones he chose to carry his questions.

Rather than confessing narcissism, the line acknowledges responsibility. Photography is not neutral evidence; it is interpretation. To admit the image is “about me” is to own the manipulation that always exists, direction, framing, timing, rather than hiding behind the fiction of objectivity. For viewers, the lesson is to read portraits as double exposures: the sitter and the seer. For photographers, it is a challenge to know one’s biases, to deploy style as a clear voice, and to recognize that every portrait, however faithful to a face, is also a self-portrait by other means.