Nikki S. Lee
[Photographer, b. 1970, Kye-Chang, Korea, lives in New York.]
My work is really simple, actually. I’m just playing with forms of changing.
Cindy Sherman
[Artist, b. 1954, Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lives in New York.]
It has nothing to do with me. I work with myself, that’s my material somehow, but the finished photograph has more to offer than reflections of my “personality”... My photographs are certainly not self-portraits or representations of myself, though unfortunately people always keep saying they are.
Orlan (Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte)
[Artist, b. 1947, St. Etienne, France, lives in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.]
I can observe my own body cut open, without suffering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities.
Juergen Teller
[Photographer, b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany, lives in London.]
Everything in a wide sense is a kind of a self-portrait. It’s just the way you see things and you’re curious about certain things and just excited about them.
Lucas Samaras
[Artist, b. 1936, Kastoria, Greece, lives in New York.]
I have wanted to photographically explore my body for years and I was going to have a professional photographer do it. But I have never been able to work well with others, and I was not going to go to a photography school and learn photography. Polaroid came in handy.
Diane Arbus
[Photographer, b. 1923, New York, d. 1971, New York.]
What’s left after what one isn’t is taken away is what one is.
Jeff Koons
[Artist, b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Sex with love is a higher state. It’s an objective state, in which one lives and enters the eternal, and I believe that’s what I showed people. That’s why it wasn’t pornographic.
(On the hard-core self-portraits he made having sex with his wife Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and exhibited under the title “Made in Heaven.”)
Alec Soth
[Photographer, b. 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota, lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.]
Whether you are Minor White or Robert Frank, almost every photograph starts with an act of pure description—a window. But every now and then you catch a glimpse of the photographer’s reflection. The mirror is just another function of the window.
