The world is shrinking as we see more and more of it in the media, and the more we see of the world, the smaller we are, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.
What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight of to a terrible, terrible degree - a devastating degree - is that their victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are perpetrated on them.
There's no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.
What I'm good at is making art.
There are photographs that I don't take now that I previously would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
They were without clothes before I got there, and they were without clothes when I left.
As soon as you forbid something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring shame in as a phenomenon.
It's no small irony that the government inevitably and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like to repress.
That's my ambition: that you look at the pictures and realize what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my subjects is.
All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace being what they were in the situations I photographed them in.
I'm an artist that's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a way of being.
I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.
The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.
But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if and when I do avoid different things I don't send any messages in doing so.
I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.
If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work is legitimate art.
A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.
I became good at defending myself, but as far as I was concerned, that was a transient skill.
I'd rather get back to making art than talk about it.
