Use between three and five photos in your gallery. Galleries with more photos are more competitive, but after five they seem to pass a point of saturation and diminishing return.
When we launched our [ Vogue] site around five years ago, I had already started this process on paper. We are now building an enormous portfolio of photos, we've uploaded two million photos and we have three people that review them.
I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were.
We had a love-hate relationship. Jackie knew exactly what she could get out of one of my photos.
At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
It never occurred to me that there were so many wonderful photos that had been orphaned and were out there in the world, waiting to be found. Over time, I found a lot of very strange pictures of kids, and I wanted to know who they were, what their stories were. Since the photos had no context, I decided I needed to make it up.
My concept was, within the five-minute video, for people to see one million Buddhas. So I made a group of the images and it keeps accelerating to reach this one million point. The movie was invented from the still photos.
You are mine, Aisling. You are mine today, tomorrow and five hundred years from now. You will always be mine. I do not give up my treasures, kincsem. You would do well to remember that.
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
When I started out in fashion, everything had to be very structured and tight and controlling, and now I'm getting to a point where I think - I could wear a great big parka, that could be quite fabulous. I haven't always got to show off my size, show off my shape. It's a turning point for me.
I'd come here planning to leave as soon as I could. It was a pit stop, not a destination. I had my whole life mapped out." "So what happened?" "I guess that map didn't turn out to be mine after all.
Photography is an individual passion of mine. I don't get paid to do it, although people offer me money. I do it because I love it, and if there's no money attached, I don't have to do anything. It's my weekend away, my vacation, whether it's an hour or five hours or editing photos on my laptop in the middle of the night. It gives me relief from all the other stuff.
Some of my favorite photos from the old days are of people who maybe didn't know how to smile. Maybe smiling in photos wasn't an accepted form of behavior back then. But the big eyes and the oversized dolls that people are carrying, and it's something about their hair - the anachronisms of these photos are really what creep me out.
It was at a big swap meet that I discovered you could buy other people's old discarded family photos and vacation pictures for pretty cheap - a quarter, 50 cents, five bucks for a really nice one.