I get into all sorts of trouble with my publicists and with newspapers because I won't do photographs.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don't parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay.
I hate being the subject of photographs.
I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.
What I have tried to do is involve the people I was photographing... if they were willing to give, I was willing to photograph.
I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
Sometimes in news photography and so on, the pictures are a little bit dry, and put on the page and just set in a journalistic way in front of you.
I don't know; I don't really look at pictures of me when I'm in public.
I say no to photographs. When people take my picture, I feel like they've taken a piece of me, and I can't get that back. It's soul-draining.
One newspaper even published one of my nude paintings - the one of me naked from the waste up.
I always give a print to everybody I photograph, and some of my subjects have told me they have a hard time hanging them up at home.