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.
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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.
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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.
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I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little pleats: it was the girls I liked.
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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.
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Rockers are the nicest people to photograph. They have no inhibitions.
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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.
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