I used to live with Teri Toye in the '80s - a really gorgeous transsexual. She won Girl of the Year in 1986 [I think] as a Chanel model and she introduced this whole way of slinky, slow-motion modeling. It was amazing that the girl of the year was actually born male.

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.

[I influenced by ]the work of early [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Orson Welles and [Carlo] Pasolini, I love [Nicolas Jack] Roeg's film "Performance".

I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

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

One of the fashion things I ever did was for Helmut Lang for Visionaire magazine and I used people from all genders. People from the age of 18 - like James King - to people like my friend Sharon [Stone] who's about 50 or older. People of all different shapes and literally all different genders and my boyfriend at the time and his daughter who was 11.

Yes, photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures.