Fashion

Fashion has been very good to me. Not just the money, which has paid for almost everything we own, but the freedom to make it up as you go along. I know that sounds selfish, but the fashion industry has a large appetite, and there are too many pictures to make every season to be bogged down with layouts and meetings and focus groups. I’ve done many shoots when the concept is a place: go somewhere and do pictures. Stay in nice hotels, eat well, photograph attractive people-- good work if you can get it.

The trick, as I’ve discovered, is to use fashion as much as it uses you. As easy as fashion pictures are to make in bulk, making one to last...well, there’s the rub. Most of the time, all the contrivance that is fashion--the hair and makeup, the fashion itself, the photoshopped everything, the surreal life the models are placed in--only serves to date the photographs. Five years from now, or less, the pictures look and smell as dated as milk eight months past its expiration date. Yet, now and then, every once in a moon, you can get very lucky and make a picture that honors all the resource that has been dumped in your lap. A photograph that lasts. That, I can tell you, is worth the trip.