… the CCPP will be my lifetime project. The idea came in Sevilla (Spain) in March 2013. It consists simply in taking a photo of a coffee cup, during a moment of the day to help you remember time.

As it passes, most of these moments will be forgotten. This project is a way to remember family members, friends, people, events, places and emotions you share in your life and how you want to show it…

Needless to say, you have full control of your creativity and any type of camera or way of recording is suitable. So go and take a photo of a cup of coffee…

But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I’ve lost what’s really there…been seduced by someone else’s standard of beauty or by the sitter’s own idea of the best in him.

That’s not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.

When the sitting is over, I feel kind of embarrassed about what we’ve shared. It’s so intense. Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I’m holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I’m photographing.

I never knew I did that, and obviously what I’m doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I’m photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.

Richard Avedon – 1980

I want to discover and establish them through photography. This is strictly my affair and does not explain these pictures by any means. Anyone else not having the desire to take them would realise that I must have felt this was purely personal. This reason, whether it be good or bad, is the only reason I can give for these photographs.

‘The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different, but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.

I realise that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

‘I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.

– Harry  Callahan

Which was proof, once and for all, of the flexibility of the camera and its validity as an instrument of expression.

There are many paintings and buildings that are not works of art. It is the man behind whatever instrument who determines the work of art.

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams,  or from an unconscious drive.  I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint,  the things which already have an existence.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask “how,” while others of a more curious nature will ask “why.” Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

– Man Ray

To work for French Vogue at that time was wonderful: Who else would have published these nudes or the crazy and sexually charged fashion photographs which I would submit to the editor in chief?

Since the commercialization and banality of editorial magazine pages have made this work uninteresting, advertising has become an increasingly important part of my work. It is intersting to compare European and American mores in regard to my work.

One will notice that most of my European images have a stronger sexual content that those destined for American publication. The term ‘political correctness’ has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell’s ‘thought police’ and fascist regimes.

– Helmut  Newton

Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. Measure the difference between that and working with someone you don’t know as much about.

Of course there are many good photographs that have nothing to do with staying close to home, and I guess what I’m really saying is that you should take pictures of something that has meaning for you…

Photography’s like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It’s always hungry.  It needs to be read to, taken care of. I had to nourish my work with different approaches.

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

– Annie Leibovitz

I think photography is a matter of controlling what’s in front of you and making it do your will.  This, of course,  implies absolute mastery over camera, medium, techniques, and the ability to work with the subject and get him willingly and happily without any self-conscious feeling to fall into those things which are natural to him.

This is a very complicated thing to do in portraiture. Mine are deliberately self-conscious portraits and therefore contain no forced feeling of candidness… the subject is unaware of the fact that I am  waiting – things begin to happen – the man begins to reveal himself.”

“If the background becomes overwhelming and you lose the personality, then I have not made a good portrait and it is not a good picture. I think the world is  full of intelligent people who are not really trying to be flattered; what they really want is to be understood”.

“The more I get to know my subject the more he gets to know me, and so often the pictures taken at the end of a sitting are much better both creatively and interpretively… A photographer is always in a state of preparing himself for a given moment… we have only an instant in which to think and act.

– Arnold  Newman