When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable.
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 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.
Before, I’d photograph anything. I didn’t think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.
But empirically I’ve come to understand that my photographs really don’t do any harm.
The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.
They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left.
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.
What I’m good at is making art.
I’d rather get back to making art than talk about it.
The kids really enjoy what they do. I check with them constantly to make sure that they’re really happy to be there.
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.
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.
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.
The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very, very collaborative.
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.
There are photographs that I don’t take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t like being caressed.
I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys.