 The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very, very collaborative. |
| If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art. |
| I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I've known them for a very long time. |
| As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon. |
| 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's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects 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. |
| I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me. |
| 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. |
| All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in. |
| If somebody's pointing a trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing that, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in there. |
| Physical beauty is such a strange thing. |
| It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress. |
| But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm. |
| When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable. |
| In fact, I don't believe I'm guilty of any crimes, but I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual and psychological change, and there's an erotic aspect to that. |
| 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. |
| I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it. |
| I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so. |
| What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them. |
