There isn't a person alive who doesn't like being caressed.
Physical beauty is such a strange thing.
But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
I just yesterday returned from a trip where I photographed a woman with two children whom I photographed first when she was the age of the older of the two children.
I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical and psychological change. If I'm able to make pictures of children that are so real, as you follow the children over the years in any given book, and in subsequent books they get older and older and grow up, perhaps there might be something cautionary in that visual example. Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.
I know the families that I photograph extremely well and have known them for a very long time.
What I'm good at is making art.
The kids really enjoy what they do. I check with them constantly to make sure that they're really happy to be there.
As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.
If somebody's pointing a trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing that, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in there.
I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.
I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys.
The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.
I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.
I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.
If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.
Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.
It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.
No two people take on the information of being admirable and being admired in the same way.
Some of the people that I photographed as sticks became much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I think they're even more beautiful.
That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.
That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.
I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.
We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.
The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.
