I am always stimulated by people. Almost never by ideas.
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've photographed just about everyone in the world. But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.
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.
People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion.
When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.
The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.
i think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people
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.
To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.