I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I’ve known them for a very long time.
I’m an artist that’s attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.
I’m the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That’s no errand for me.
When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable.
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.
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.
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.
Virtually always I get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot’s done.
It’s no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.
It’s really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively.
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.
I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.
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.
We live in an age where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off.
But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
I will always admit immediately to what’s obvious, which is that Homo sapiens is inherently erotic or inherently sensual from birth.
I found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the raid on my apartment happened.
I’m guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it’s a naivete that I really don’t want to abandon, not even now.
I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.