Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]

 I knew I really didn’t look that good, and that Edward [Weston] had glorified me, but it was a very pleasant thing to be glorified and I couldn’t wait to go back for more. 

Naomi Campbell
[Model and actress, b. 1970, Streatham, South London, England, lives in New York.]

 I trust pictures, but no pictures made in my world—because I know what goes on. 

Nastassja Kinski
[Model and actress, b. 1959, West Berlin, Germany, lives in Los Angeles and Europe.]

 When I cannot get that moment of truth where you feel yourself opening up like a flower, I absolutely loathe the bloody camera. I can just feel this black hole eyeing me, sucking me in, and I feel like smashing it to smithereens. 

Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]

 What makes a great model is her need, her desire; and it’s exciting to photograph desire. 
 I’d photographed a lot of women, and Marilyn was the best. She’d move into an idea, I’d see it, quickly lock it in, click it, and my strobes would go off like a lightning flash—PKCHEWW!!—and get it with a zillionth of a second. (On photographing the actress six weeks before her death.) 

Georgia O'Keeffe
[Artist, b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico.]

 We’d make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me. (On modeling for Alfred Stieglitz) 

Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson)
[Actress, b. 1926, Los Angeles, d. 1962, Los Angeles.]

 It’s like being screwed by a thousand guys and you can’t get pregnant. (On what happens between her and still cameras, to photographer Ernst Cunningham.) 

Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. 
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