Provocative Imagery Quotes

Imagery is powerful. Imagery is provocative - satellite imagery much more so because it is from space, and it allows us to get this perspective that we don't have to have otherwise.

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso's painting long enough. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a by product of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent art belongs to that category.

I want to produce images that startle one into recollection.

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.

Most of the time the ones who dislike the pictures the most confirm to me that the picture has hit home and is probably truer than I know. Nobody minds a boring picture, they mind a picture that has gotten to the soft core.

I like to create provocative imagery. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it goes awry.

I say more power to [Madonna], though I don't know how much more power is out there.

Anything can be misinterpreted. People can look at Christ on a cross and think, This is an image of murder, this is violent, this has sexual imagery in it. And it just - I think it's my job as an artist to be out there pushing people's buttons and making them question everything.

When 'Penthouse' and 'Hustler' came along, they confused what I was trying to do. Before they arrived, we were perceived as a sophisticated men's magazine.

Helmut Newton shot the ad campaign [for Bad Influence]. It's [James] Spader at the top of his game, right after Sex, Lies And Videotape. It's sexy. It's weird. It's dark. The characters are great.

At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about.

I don't think that there's that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.

Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?

Pornography is any act that has no artistic merit and causes sexual thoughts...Sounds like almost every commercial on TV to me.

I like to undress women - not to dress them. You know, like Manet's 'Olympia' or Helmut Newton's photographs - naked women with shoes. This is what I am trying to do.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

I'm not against half naked girls - not as often as I'd like to be.

Madonna is interesting. She changed music. She definitely did. She gave me an opportunity that no one else would give me, so I am very grateful to her.