I got my first camera when I was 21 - my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday - but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My stepfather gave me a Kodak camera when I was 17 years old. I started working at a local photo store in Le Havre, France, taking passport pictures and photographing weddings.
I did have a very advanced grandmother, my mother's mother, who wanted to buy me a camera. My parents wouldn't let her. Eventually she won, and I got a camera in about 1948, a Voigtlander.
I think, if you put a camera in anyone's life and document it daily from the age of 21 to 27, there are going to be things that aren't always pretty.
I grew up as a photo nut. Every Christmas I would get a new camera. It's a huge part of my life.
I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.
When I was a kid, my mother used to film all of our holidays and all of the good times, and I kind of associated the camera with everything being okay and everything being happy.
I became interested in film making at around 16, when I discovered a friend of mine had a HI 8 camera which belonged to his father, which we were forbidden to use.
I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.
I got a camera when I was nine years old and it wasn't until I was a model that I realized you could be a photographer for a job.
I can't remember exactly how old I was when my parents gave me my first camera, but it was a Canon, and I was certainly far too young to have such a good camera.