I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.

It began when I was so ill that there was a good chance of dying. I promised myself that if I survived I would never again pander to a magazine's requests or follow the ideas of art directors. I would only make images which were personal, which arose out of my own life.

It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The photographs don't arouse me. All I can think about is the hard work it took to make them.

I used to hate doing color. I hated transparency film. The way I did color was by not wanting to know what kind of film was in my camera.

I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.