Black and white means photography to me. It's much easier to take a good color photograph, but you can get more drama into a black and white one.
It is a serious job being a portrait photographer, which is how I saw myself.
We knew of Sartre and we dressed like the French existentialists. Our philosophy then, and remember we were only little kids, was more in following their looks than their thoughts. We were going around looking moody.
For me, they are still my dear friends, not the Beatles.
Our post-war generation were struggling to escape the past and the burden of guilt we carried and to find a new way.
When I met the Beatles, they were wearing these funny little leather jackets, which inspired me. I had a suit made for myself out of fine, good black leather. It looked different. I was using leather but putting a different fashion angle on how it looked.
John's legacy? His bravery. When he had the power, he used it. He really wanted peace on Earth, and John's lyrics, well, that's the brave poetry of the '60s. If he had stayed with us, he could have done so much more.
They are my friends. If they are the Beatles or the kings of China, it doesn't matter lo me.
I was initially attracted to John when I first went to see them play. Then I got to know Stuart because he was John's best friend. Our hearts took over from there.
Well when you're young, you're just in love and every day is so new and so fresh and so beautiful. You just don't think of the future.
Well, the first time I met The Beatles was through my former boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, who saw them one night when he was wandering around Hamburg and then he heard this beautiful sound of rock 'n' roll music.
You couldn't buy any English authors or anything that came from America, like jeans. It was impossible. So we had to do our own clothes if we had weird ideas like wearing long scarves like the French people did. You had to knit them yourself.
Stuart was a very special person and he was miles ahead of everybody. You know as far as intelligent and artistic feelings are concerned, he was miles ahead. So I learned a lot from him and because in the '60s we had a very strange attitude towards being young, towards sex, towards everything.
And I was very, very much influenced by the films of Jean Cocteau and by Sartre and everything that came out of France because it was closer than America or England.
I was always introduced as the Beatles photographer and I gave it up in the end. I was so unsure of myself. Am I good or am I just the Beatles photographer? People were not interested in what I did before. I could not stand it any more.
I've hardly taken a photograph since 1967.
I'm not a businesswoman... I never looked after my negatives and you need that to prove you took the photographs.
For me, the music of the Beatles then was serious and very, very serious art. So I couldn't take a picture of John laughing his head off or pulling funny faces because he was a serious artist, even when he was only 20.
I always thought Stuart deserved a little bit of fame. He was a gifted artist and a very wonderful person.
The most important thing I gave the Beatles was my friendship. They trusted me: there was no fear in being photographed.
