"I was reading something that Woody Allen had written about Charlie Chaplin. He said that Chaplin had the ability to disappoint his audience, to go further than they were willing to go. You can translate this to photography. There are some kinds of people who find something they do, they do it well, they have an audience for it, they're beloved for it, and that's their lives. And there are other people who want to get better, and they do this at the risk of losing their audience."

The Great Client
"Gordon Bowman at United Technologies—he'd send me out to do something and if it didn't work out, I'd call and say, 'This is not going to work.' He'd say, 'Okay, figure something else out and get back to us.' It wasn't, 'I sent you to do that and you have to do it.'

"For instance, they sent me out to photograph cars being spray painted because they made the finish for the cars. I got to the factory and that day they were doing champagne color, and puce, and beige, and it was an explosive atmosphere and I couldn't set up any lights, and my cameras were getting full of paint. So I called up and said, 'This is impossible.' They said, 'Go ahead, figure out something else.' So I thought, what they're really talking about is the ability of the car to look good and last over time, so I did a bunch of pictures of a red car that had a beautiful finish. Then I wet the car down and shot it with a reflection, so it's talking about the ability of the car to withstand moisture and heat. But they didn't use that; they didn't like it. But they did use something else I did on that red car. So my feeling is, if you do exactly what the client is telling you, you're a plumber. You'll make a lot of money, but there's no creativity.

"Another time they sent me out to photograph for a wind farm they were going to build. They sent me to Point Lobos to get [images of] nature that had been formed by the wind, things at an angle and stuff like that, and I did it, and as I was going home I looked up in the sky in San Francisco and there were hang gliders, and I thought, that's what they really want. They really don't want what nature does with wind, they want what man does with wind. So I got the hang gliders and they thought that was a great idea.

"And that's a great client."