I have no ambivalence about myself wearing make-up or designer clothes but I have an enormous ambivalence about what the fashion world has done to women.

There are ways of angling the camera. I don't just use a tripod. The only time I did that was in '88 when I first came out of detox, I spent every day doing self-portraits to fit back into my own skin. I didn't know what the world looked like - what I looked like - so in order to fit back into myself, I took self-portraits everyday to give myself courage and to fit the pieces back together. I used a tripod then.

At the same time as the UK Vogue one, I did a shoot that took about 40 days of friends and people I admired in Paris, for French Vogue. This is how I met Maria Schneider in June and which began our friendship.

For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It's a way of touching somebody - it's a caress… I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.

When I started photographing my boyfriend of years ago, Brian, I realised I had no right to photograph other people having sex if I wasn't prepared to take them of myself too

I'm very influenced by a lot of things, but my chief influence is my friends and what I see and what I feel and my own experiences and memory.

I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.