Photographer

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable - and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.

Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring... and I've already... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with.

Fashion is where I make my living. I'm not knocking it; it's a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.

People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.

Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.

Just advertising departments with legs and high heels.

I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures.

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

Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.

I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.

I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair. Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people.

Any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

Faces are the ledgers of our experience.

People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

If each photograph steals a bit of the soul, isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?

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.

I never wanted to be called an artist. I wanted to be called a photographer.