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In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.

I think a photograph, of whatever it might be - a landscape, a person - requires personal involvement. That means knowing your subject, not just snapping at what's in front of you.

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.

Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You're photographing a relationship with the person you're shooting; there's an exchange, and that's what that picture is.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.