Terry Richardson
[Photographer, b. 1965, New York, lives in New York.]
I used to always want to shoot nudes, but when I’d say to models, “Hey, do you want to do this?" they’d be like, “No way, why don’t you get naked?”... So then I got this idea that since I’d always got worked up and would, like, pop a boner when I was shooting women that maybe they’d get more into it if I let them start shooting me. So now I’ve got all of these rolls of myself where I’m being ordered around by women while they take nudes of me...
Thomas Ruff
[Photographer, b. 1958, Zell, Germany, lives in Dusseldorf, Germany.]
I’ve been interested in the genre of nude photography for a long time. What I find altogether boring is contemporary nude photography of the kind currently carried on by fashion photographers, who take supposedly interesting photographs of pretty models in some pleasant ambience. That’s something for adolescent 13-year-old
Max readers. I’m 41, and when I’m naked I’m either lying in the tub or in bed with my girlfriend. My nude photographs are intended to be somewhat “more adult.”
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
[Writer, photographer, mathematician, and logician, b. 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England, d. 1898, Guildford, Surrey, England.]
I confess I do
not admire naked boys. They always seem to me to need clothes, whereas one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should
ever be covered up.
George Bernard Shaw
[Writer, critic, and dramatist, b. 1856, Dublin, d. 1950, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England.]
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
Eve Arnold
[Photographer, b. 1913, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 2011, London.]
The first time I met Joan Crawford she took off all her clothes, stood in front of me nude and insisted I photograph her... sadly, something happens to flesh after 50.
(On the behavior of film star Joan Crawford, drunk and desperate to rebuild her career. Three months later, a resurgent Crawford wrote Arnold from the film set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in which she co-starred with Bette Davis: “You would have been so proud of me. I was a lady, not like that cunt, Bette Davis.”)
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography.
Helmut Newton
[Photographer, b. 1920, Berlin, d. 2004, Los Angeles.]
If I say to a person, I want to see you naked, and in my head I say, Well I would like to fuck her but the reason I don’t is because I’m scared to gets AIDS or something...
Bill Jay
[Photographer, writer, and curator, b. 1940, Maidenhead, England, d. 2009, Samara, Costa Rica.]
Evolution in action: First, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ Then, he created two nude models. Now we have photographers.
