Terry Richardson
[Photographer, b. 1965, New York, lives in New York.]
To me, my best pictures happen when I capture the spirit of Black Flag’s
Nervous Breakdown EP.
You can’t give your photograph soul with technique. I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms. It should say, “Fucking now. The time is ripe. Come on.”
At the beginning, people laughed at me because I was using snappies. Sometimes, a celebrity would look at my camera and go, “Oh, I’ve got one of those.” I'd feel like handing it to them and saying, “Well, you take the pictures then.” But I like using snapshot cameras because they’re idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I’m no good at focusing big cameras.
I used to always want to shoot nudes, but when I’d say to models, “Hey, do you want to do this?" they’d be like, “No way, why don’t you get naked?”... So then I got this idea that since I’d always got worked up and would, like, pop a boner when I was shooting women that maybe they’d get more into it if I let them start shooting me. So now I’ve got all of these rolls of myself where I’m being ordered around by women while they take nudes of me...
I don’t like to exploit anybody. That’s not my bag. Everyone has fun on my shoots.
(Defending against a flood of sexual harassment allegations.)
I don’t work off lights and angles; I work off emotions. A mood that I create.
