I'm not trying to make it real
To make a photograph that makes the world look real
would seem to be kind of pointless
I'm trying to present
a fictional world that has more than truth in it
I worked initially with fashion magazines
And thankfully, the editor in chief
who really took a kind of liking
to what I was trying to say
was Franca Sozzani
of Vogue Italia
and she understood
that I wasn't into just making happy, squeaky-clean pictures
and I wanted to say something
So I had my message and then I had my means
My message is that the world is a bit fucked
My means were through a fashion magazine
to show this, to trick people into buying into it
To look at these pictures and think
that it's something beautiful but actually that it was unsettling
When I started photography, color was not really used
in an expressive way
It was used much more in a naturalistic way
and actually that the main idea
about photography
when I began in the mid-90s
was that black and white photography was artistic
And color photography was kind of
Well, color photography was just represented the real world
but that black and white was somehow
transformative and therefore art
My thought is it is kind of
worth challenging and so I challenged it
Beautiful. Great
I think working for a magazine like Vogue Italia
you could say what you wanted about the world
but if it was ugly they wouldn't print it
I thought nothing better than actually to kind of ambush the reader
in a magazine like Vogue with these images
that were seemingly beautiful but actually unsettling
because that's the message I wanted to say
For example, the series of images about lipstick colors
but have no girl in the picture to wear the lipstick
Like a fried egg with a cigarettes stubbed out in the egg
But at the end of the day it's a rather ugly picture
An ugly thing made beautiful
I work now more and more with galleries and museums.
The project I did with Harland Miller, the painter
they were based on his amazing paintings
of these kind of faux book covers that he does
I took these paintings and reduced them back
to being just simple books
Gilbert & George, I'd photographed before
I thought about this idea of a female stranger
or even an androgynous stranger
arriving at their home
and spending the weekend
Maurizio Cattelan, I thought
maybe there could be this sort
of classical muse who is questioning
his work in her space
These three collaborations
they hang together really beautifully
There's a grey kind of play of textures
from project to project
To say my preference would be to photography women
would be an understatement, of course
I didn't really have that sort of father figure
so the woman, the mother
the sister, the wife figure were much more
kind of concrete stories for me to work with
I am interested in the woman
as a protagonist and central figure
in my story about the world
and how I feel the world is such a strange place
And I don't want to just make a picture that's sexy
To me that's completely pointless
I'm after a picture that's troubling
That's lovely, yes
My father, although he was absent
he himself was a great kind of colorist
Taught me how to focus the lens on the eyelashes of the subject
I always liked that
And even today, I still
use that trick of looking very, very closely
at someone's eyelashes and focusing on them
and de-focusing and then focusing again on the eyelashes
My pictures try to...
...be truthful
It's just about what motivates
human behavior
The great fiction is more truthful
than reportage
in newspapers, possibly
That you really get to the truth of the human spirit and soul
and the animal that we are