There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.
I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.
If you don't have anything to say, your photographs aren't going to say much.
I think there are two types of photographers, those who want to document the world and those who want to create their own world. I am more interested in documenting the world and presenting it to people with the question attached, 'Does this make any sense to you?'
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed
I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.
There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.
We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
I didn't try and do fashion pictures. I tried to do portraits of girls wearing dresses.
It's hard for me to assess what I brought because each time you pick up a camera and point it at a person, you're trying to define that person so to talk generally is difficult because I have to think of a given image in order to conjure up what we're talking about.
The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.
