The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.

If you look at photographers who say, "I hate digital photography," they all use Photoshop, even if it's to make the sky just a little more blue than it was. Manipulation is very discrete and because it's so discrete nobody cares about it anymore. People accept manipulated photographs, I think.

In photography, you always have both the medium and the depicted subject at the same time.

There have to be at least two copies of a photograph, otherwise it’s not a photograph.

You cannot explain the whole world in one photograph. Photography pretends. You can see everything that's in front of the camera, but there's always something beside it.

I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.

If things are the way they are, why should I try to make them look different?