A photographer is responsible for creating a climate in which they can do their best work.
Shoot what you can’t help but shoot.
To me, style is like your fingerprint. Nobody else has it.
The picture I was hoping for is never the picture I get, but yeah, I think they fail all the time. Fortunately my clients don’t think they do, so I can continue to have a career. But I just look at them and think.
I’m an artist in residence, I’ve still been able to accept commercial jobs, and what I’ll do is I’ll make little videos on the side that I then bring back to the school and show the students the next day.
I wanted to grow in terms of making pictures, not adapting to new software and technology. But that’s the game now.
Digital held no romance for me at all. I hated it. I miss my big cameras. The working process, I miss it.
My brother used to say some people have an “inferiority simplex.” It’s not that they’re under the delusion that they’re inferior; they actually are inferior and they secretly know it.
People aren’t hiring just a picture, they’re hiring someone they can work with. That plays a big role .
There’s no reason you’d shoot Mother Theresa and Newt Gingrich the same way.
I never do pictures that I’ve done before – but I really try not to. Whenever I get an assignment I try to think how to shoot this person for this story in this magazine at this point in time.
Magazines don’t have enough confidence to have their own style, so they use a borrowed style. That is shocking to me, but your perception is very accurate. It’s a way to be more commercially viable, but to me, that’s not having a style, that’s having a schtick.
The last thing people want is a surprise, these days.
I was shooting lots of large format portraits then but I’ve since changed to digital, where you have so much more control. There are millions of things you can do with digital; you can be more spontaneous, and you’re more in control of your color palette.
There are a lot of decisions to make, creatively. Now, with digital, you can really be the author of your own work. From the beginning to the end of the process, you control everything.