Different members of different cultures will think that some things are beautiful.
A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don’t know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.
I don't photograph any two people who are remotely the same.
Any artist that's involved in their work is inevitably going to have a focus in what they do.
All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.
What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them.
When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed consent question was answerable.
The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.
There are photographs that I don’t take now, that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures.
My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it.
I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.
I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.
I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body. Now, I recognize that there are certain postures and angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or something, and I avoid that.
In fact, I don’t believe I’m guilty of any crimes, but I’ve always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual, and psychological change, and there’s an erotic aspect to that.
Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.
It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.
They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left.
The images I like best are parts of series that I've started, in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy.
I will always admit immediately to what’s obvious, which is that homo sapiens is inherently erotic or sensual from birth.
I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.
Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot's done.
I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.
There's no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.
But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.
