A Quote by Patti Smith

You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with Robert Mapplethorpe. — © Patti Smith
You can't work on that scale without trust. I learned that from working with 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.
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.
He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe)
It got to the point where I started hiding because I didn't want to be photographed. (On living with Robert Mapplethorpe)
I learned a lot from Clint [Eastwood], who's an extremely economic director. I learned a lot from Michael Winterbottom, who really gave a lot of trust in the actors and allowed them to live in the space instead of trying to manipulate and make it too set and too staged. Working with [Robert] De Niro taught me a lot of being an actors' director and what that is. I've learned a lot from pretty much everybody. Hopefully I've picked up something from everybody I've worked with.
From childhood my mother had me examining Robert Mapplethorpe's style and Egon Schiele's framing - that's what modelling is about.
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.
Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.
I was thrilled to work opposite Carl Reiner and Robert De Niro. Mr. Reiner was very chatty and delightful, but I learned that if you want Robert De Niro to like you, don't speak at all, and he'll be friendly to you.
The gift of working on a Robert O'Hara play is that you have to trust his language. It's all in there. You don't have to add one single thing.
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 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.
I know that, for me, working with people like Robert Rodriguez and Ridley Scott and the Coen brothers and Oliver Stone and Gus Van Sant was so much easier than working with a lot of the people I had worked with before, because with these guys, there's not a lot of ego involved. It's all about the work. It's all about how to make the story better. So at the end of the day, you feel a trust that you usually don't feel - or at least I haven't felt in the past with most people.
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.
There is no use in running before you are sent; there is no use in attempting to do God's work without God's power. A man working without this unction, a man working without this anointing, a man working without the Holy Ghost upon him, is losing time after all.
I trust Robert Mueller, I trust our intelligence community and I trust our national security community because I've worked with them my entire adult life.
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