Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
I moved to New York when I was 15, but my parents lived nearby in Connecticut, so I could go be in this incredible countryside when I needed it.
No one would bring their horse into a studio, because they don't want to bring their prized animals into an environment where they wouldn't be comfortable or where they might panic and hurt themselves.
It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.
With photography a new language has been created. Now for the first time it is possible to express reality by reality. We can look at an impression as long as we wish, we can delve into it and, so to speak, renew past experiences at will.
The first time I heard of suicidegirls was when a model from there contacted me to see if I wanted to do a shoot. I can't remember what happened with that but we didn't end up doing it.
Stanley Goodspeed: Mason, you all right? John Mason: [hanging upside down] Yes. Perfectly okay, you fucking idiot.
Stanley Goodspeed: You're not leaving! There's a madman in there with his hand on a... ON A BUTTON! John Mason: Shh! [to himself] John Mason: Some sniper's gonna get his ass.
Stanley Goodspeed: [Goodspeed knocks Mason off the ledge left hanging by a rope] Are you ok? John Mason: Perfectly fine you fucking idiot!
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it's not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.
I suppose we carry photographs now, but I think it's rather wonderful that people used to carry drawings and watercolours. I wish people did that more often.
I am impressed with what happens when someone stays in the same place and you took the same picture over and over and it would be different, every single frame.
I realized I couldn't be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved.
I was scared to do anything in the studio because it felt so claustrophobic. I wanted to be somewhere where things could happen and the subject wasn't just looking back at you.
A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they’ll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won’t do a thing for you if you don’t have anything in your head or in your heart.
Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.
We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.
I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.
As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.
I have never been able to see myself as fitting into one category, and I have never been able to limit my contact with people to one group of people.
