Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page ripped out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum—someone’s private museum. 

 My biggest advice would be to take the pictures you want to take. Don’t think about the marketplace, what sells, or what an editor might say. And don’t think about style. It’s all bullshit and surface stuff. 

 Sometimes I meet young actors who balk at being photographed and say it’s not cool, but they think James Dean was cool, and I remind them that James Dean left a legacy of thousands of photographs and maybe, like, three films. That famous picture of James Dean as the lone, struggling actor walking in Times Square? That was a photo session. 

 I try to get the visual part of my brain turned on. It’s like a muscle that you need to start working. Once I do that the ideas just start coming. 

 The two most ripped-off photographers in the past six years have been Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. These two artists took some harrowing pictures of themselves, their lovers, their fights. What some fashion photographers did was imitate these artists by getting some model and fucking up her hair and putting her in a Prada top and Gucci shoes and throwing her in a dirty apartment that’s not her own. They say these pictures are more modern and more real, but they’re fantasy presented as real. My work is fantasy presented as fantasy; I’m into escapism and beauty. I live on the Lower East Side, and once, I lived in a squat. I’ve had friends OD, so I don’t want to see someone looking strung out—I’ve been there. 

 ...the computer is slave to the camera, because without a good photograph all the technology in the world doesn’t make a good picture. You have to have a good photograph to begin with. 

 For years, all I wanted was to make enough money shooting pictures to survive in New York. I never expected this.