I was a hired gun, more or less.

I was able to work with two heads. If anything, doing ads and other commercial work were at least exercises in discipline.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

I don't care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.

All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.

I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

Los Angeles has interested me for a long time. I was in Texas for five years, for the same reason. I wanted to photograph there.