That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.

But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.

I'll go to do a shoot, I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when people think I'm all out of film, then they really relax and I get my good pictures.

My hope is that the work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with looking at the body and fantasizing about what you could do with that body, completely ignoring how the person might feel about it.

The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are very very collaborative.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.