Obviously there was Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe, but Howard was on the brink of becoming a famous director - it didn't happen because he died.
A friend of mine back in 1989 did an illegal rave in Vauxhall. He got Keith Haring to come along and tag the side of the wall. My friend cut it out of the wall and he kept it under his bed for 20 years. Then a few years ago he asks me if I want to buy it... so I spent £12,000 on a Keith Haring.
I met Keith Haring at SVA college where he was having an art show, later we had a group art show at the Mud Club in NYC. Keith owed me $50, so he gave me a large framed canvas with barking dogs that had large dicks. I painted over Keith's painting to paint flowers for my mom's living room.
Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.
It got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe)
Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.
You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe.
He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe)
With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.
From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.
I made the first 'Blumen' picture after looking at Robert Mapplethorpe's Pictures book. I was struck by how much freedom Mapplethorpe was able to extract from his model's restraint-that in tying up and cropping his models, he appears to be able to work with people as forms. I never thought about my flowers as related to his (which I saw as annoyingly erotic); I thought of them in relationship to bondage. I wanted to make the flowers more aggressive and ironic and less docile and sensual.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.
Obviously I would love to work with all these great directors like the Coen Brothers, Tarantino. Robert Rodriguez is a dream director of mine.
Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art.
Robert Mapplethorpe, I met in 1967. He was a student at Pratt, though even as a student a fully formed artist. We went through many things in our life together. He became my loved one, then my best friend.
I was reading an interview with Keith Richards in a magazine and in the interview Keith Richards intimated that kids should not do drugs. Keith Richards! Says that kids should not do drugs!
Keith, we can't do any more drugs because you already f-king did them all, alright? There's none left! We have to wait 'til you die and smoke your ashes! Jesus Christ! Talk about the pot
and the f-kin' kettle.
I wasn't familiar with Patti [Smith ]much at all. When I was asked to photograph her, my wife said, "Oh my God, Patti Smith!" So I looked at some Robert Mapplethorpe books and I recognized those pictures.