There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.
I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.
When you are doing portraits, you have that intimacy with someone for a few minutes. For a really good portrait, you don't take the portrait - it's given.
If you take a good look at the book [ Stock Photographs], it's largely a portrait gallery of faces - faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think.
I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
You can't just take an aspirin and sit around and have 12 donuts and think, 'I took my aspirin so I'm not going to have a heart attack.' It's really important each person take personal responsibility for their health. You can't keep thinking that someone else is going to take care of it. You have to be part of the solution.
I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.
I'll take photographs with kids. People who want to take photographs with me. People who like the movies. People who supported me. I'll do that all day, all night, that's fine. But the bombardment of the paparazzi is just... I truly don't understand. It just feels like this kind of gluttonous, horrific sport. It's like sport.
I go out to take a walk, I see something, I take a picture. I take photographs. I have avoided profound explanations of what I do.
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won't remember their vacation. They'll only remember what photographs they took.
Most photographs take their cues from advertising, where the priority is high image content for an easy Gestalt reading.
If you look at the image [ Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], it treads on a kind of popular stereotypical image of the black figure, in both its flatness and slightly comic edge. To take that image as a starting point and to render it in a proto-classical medium, like egg tempera, and then use a repertoire of classical compositional devices to make the picture was a way of setting up an engagement with art history.
Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation.
50 Cent is a metaphor for "change". But originally it was a gangster from Fort Greene Projects named 50 Cent and I took the name when he passed and because he's not active, I thought it'd be cool to take it.
I found that while it was interesting to travel around and take the photographs, I would find that I was more interested in the stories behind the photographs. I was more interested in narrative.
When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don't take a good picture,' what they mean is they haven't come to terms with how they look. They take a fine picture, it's just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality.
If I do a portrait, I know what they can take. If somebody's a sweet, shy person, the photographs will be sweet and shy. Of course, you ask people to do something which they might not have done before, but that's the journey, the fun element.