Larry Clark
[Photographer and filmmaker, b. 1943, Tulsa, Oklahoma, lives in New York.]
since I became a photographer I always wanted to turn back the year. always wished I had a camera when I was a boy. fucking in the backseat, gangbanging with the pretty girls all the other girls in the neighborhood hated.
Nan Goldin
[Photographer, b. 1953, Washington, D.C., lives in New York and Paris.]
… I wrote myself in as the lover. Sometimes, the obsession lasted for years. It was photography as the sublimation of sex, a means of seduction, and a way to remain a crucial part of my subjects’ lives. A chance to touch someone with a camera rather than physically.
Robert Mapplethorpe
[Photographer, b. 1946, Floral Park, Long Island, d. 1989, Boston, Massachusetts.]
A cock is more problematic [than flowers] when you’re photographing, especially if you want it erect. You can’t jiggle the lights as much, and it’s hard to refine the photograph as much as you’d like...
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
[The pornographic photograph] is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex…
Pornography ordinarily represents the sex-organ, it makes it into an immobile object (a fetish), to which we burn incense, like a god that doesn’t leave its niche.
Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death.
Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]
The only thing we photographers really want more than life, more than sex, more than anything, is to be invisible.
Rankin (John Rankin Waddell)
[Photographer, b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland, lives in London.]
I use the technique of being cheeky or rude or asking [subjects] to do ridiculous things. For example, I might talk about my sex life, or their sex life… I might say, “I’m imagining you being fucked up the arse with a big black dildo.”
