highlikefashion

I do love the internet; I do love to search on there. My one reservation is that it makes the online generation dependent on it. We didn’t have internet, we had libraries and bookshops. I remember going to the bookshops of Charing Cross road, sitting on my knees and not being able to afford the big photography books but looking at them trying to understand the lighting in those images. (To Marcus) Do you remember us sitting there together looking at Guy Bourdin photos and wondering, how did they light this? And of course you couldn’t just rip that page out. But today you can just copy it from the internet and take it to the studio. And all this availability is blinding our creativity. That is my fear. We’re not trigerring anything in the brain. It’s just there to copy or to adpat, but there’s no effort to go find something. There’s no accident, no surprise. Today, if you’re doing a double page spread of a girl who has to be lying down, you can go online and see hundreds of spreads with the girl lying down and just find a position; it’s blinding. So where’s the new generation? Why are we not seeing some crazy young photographer doing this crazy fucked-up picture that we all love? There’s no fire. No fire because there’s too much smoke. In the beginning we weren’t in Vogue. We were in nowhere. We were just doing the pictures until someone came and said, ‘We like that - we want to publish it.’ We had time to grow and crawl, to learn to walk and talk.