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don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art— studying painting and sculpture— and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your
Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh
friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93— you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right? You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s
That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think.
Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever
like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’ No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible? I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month.
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wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old.
Okay, very last question: what advice would you give a young photographer just starting out? I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have
an idea and you figure it can come back.’ From tha I realised if you’re going see somebody, or meet so at a magazine or for some tising campaign or somet you should always go wit idea. Don’t ever go unpre anywhere. Always be read