People – running from unhappiness, hiding in power – are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed.
I’ve worked out of a series of no’s. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.
Anything is an art if you do it at the level of an art.
I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
I think all art is about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.
Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.
The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.
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.
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.
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.
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s 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. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.
You can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface-gesture, costume, expression-radically and correctly.
I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them.
My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.
A portrait isn’t a fact but an opinion – an occasion rather than a truth.
Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I’ve ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.