Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The beauty of women was the first expression of my photography.
I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.
When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.
I've fallen in love with the classical world of imagery, and what I'd like to do now over the last bit of my life is to photograph some nudes.
Part of me is a sexual exhibitionist.
That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.
I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.
The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter.
There are so many great 19th-century photographers, and it's really my favorite period, but the amateurs did such beautiful work.
Mapplethorpe presented the body as a sexual object, separating it from the humanity of the person. He added nothing to photography as a medium. I hold his work in low regard.