Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.
Photography obviously lends itself so well towards fashion. It's capturing that moment and that inspiration, and as a designer you are constantly walking through the world assimilating those visual references you have and so being able to solidify that into a photograph and keep it on your mood board is essential to creating a collection.
I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.
So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.
People assumed we called the record 'Murray Street' because of its proximity to the World Trade Centre, but that wasn't it at all. Before the attacks, I had simply been walking around taking pictures of things, and I had this photograph of the street sign. We felt it was somewhat evocative and decided to use it on the back cover of the album.
Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
When I was going to gay bars in my 20s and 30s, the older guys there explained to me that the police would occasionally raid these places and march the clients out, load them onto paddy wagons, drive them down to the station, photograph them, fingerprint them and put their names on a list. They were doing nothing wrong, and it was criminalized.
But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.
I guess my choice of medium depends on how I want to interpret the idea. Sometimes the interpretation works best in a photograph, and then sometimes it works best in a drawing. But most often times, with the work, everything starts with the diorama with the photograph. Then I'm just filtering out ideas and images from the photograph and reinterpreting them in other mediums.
I have never been skinny. The thing is, I was in an industry where being athletic was not celebrated. I have friends who are supermodels, and I never had that body. I've never been asked to walk in a Versace show. I was doing the covers of the magazines while they were cruising the clothes down the runway, and then they'd bring me the clothes and I'd have to photograph them.
We perceive and interpret the outer world through a set of incredibly fine internal receptors. But we are incapable, by ourselves, of grasping or tweezing out any permanent, sharable figment of it. Practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.
When you're on a movie and the production department says, "We need old photographs of you - your character - when you were 20-years-old." I usually tell them it's in storage or I had a fire. I go back to these old photos and there's never a good photo or they're of times that I'm so glad I'm out of. They have nothing to do with the character that you're playing, so it feels false. That's one of the hardest things for me in terms of looking back.