My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

It's so rare to see a woman's sexuality, real female sexuality, either in the shows or in the clothes.

If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

My life there[in New York] was almost entirely about gay men for 30 years.

I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.

It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.

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.