While in college, I used to get my ideas from photographs in ‘National Geographic.’ I started painting palm trees and motorboats.
I feel like I need to start wearing a T-shirt saying ‘This is not a photo opportunity’. People are so lovely but you do find that when you’re out you spend 40% of your time posing for photographs.
People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer’s creation.
I’m not an ardent feminist – well, maybe I am an ardent feminist. I just roll my eyes at the way women are constantly used and how sensitive men are about photographs of themselves.
From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don’t even think twice about snapping a shot.
What do you say to your sister who poses in the nude? It’s not like you are really itching to see photographs of your sister naked. I mean, it’s just something that is not too exciting.
I’ve been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.
As a child, I always wanted to be an actor. But as I grew older, the acting dream kind of faded away, and I took to studying a lot. A few years later, a relative of mine who really wanted me to try my hand at acting sent my photographs to a few production houses, and like they say, the rest is history.
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.
My photographs don’t do me justice – they just look like me.
I have a rule that I don’t review shows from photographs or from video. I certainly might go back and look at photographs and look at video to remind myself of something or for personal information. But I never review from that.
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn’t interest me.
In Majorca, I can be myself. I go to the supermarket and the cinema, and I am just Rafa. Everyone knows me, and it is no big deal. I can go all day – no photographs.
If I do a portrait, I know what they can take. If somebody’s a sweet, shy person, the photographs will be sweet and shy. Of course, you ask people to do something which they might not have done before, but that’s the journey, the fun element.
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
There’s no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too.
Because I was traveling a lot during the ’70s, the only thing I could do on the road was take photographs, so there wasn’t much painting during those years.
When you collect photographs, you’re sort of at the mercy of the gods.
I’ve got loads of photographs of me at home with two orbs that visit me. The two that I have are about the size of melons. One sits on my arm and the other is usually in the back of the shot, sitting just over my right shoulder.
I was spoiled growing up in the 1970s because magazines were publishing the photographs of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin without compromise. You really felt that sense of freedom through their images.
I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing.
I had seen the photographs of Harlem in its glory days, stylish men in bespoke suits, women so well dressed that they’d put the models in ‘Vogue’ to shame. I knew that Harlemites loved to dance, to pray, and to eat.
