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

As a non-Catholic, and since I was a child, I have been obsessed with the ritual and the beauty of Catholic art. I look at Renaissance art all the time.

Some people have become [in U.S] a lot more conservative but I can't really speak about that because I wasn't there. I feel compassion for their pain but it distresses me to see them all become more patriotic.

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.

One of the major things I really want to work on now is female rage because that's not dealt with at all - and I have a lot of it.

That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.

The complete disregard for the camera's presence indicates its complete saturation in their lives. The subject neither notices nor seems to care that someone has been invited into their private moment.