David Bailey
[Photographer, b. 1938, London, lives in London.]
If you try to get famous you won’t, but if you don’t care you probably will. You've got to stick to your guns, too, because once you back down you’re finished.
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don’t think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I’m looking at something dead.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
They’re photographs of cocks and vaginas. They’re kind of medical, done absolutely close-up with no pretensions to lighting or anything. I just thought it’s something everybody’s got but you never see them in photographs. And, you’d be surprised at the personality of them; you can’t believe that every one is different.
Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.