I didn’t want to make pictures which were just a document of something else. I wanted to make pictures which were a thing in their own right. And so, by photographing her in the pit with an orchestra rehearsing, I just thought this [is] just never going to look as interesting as in its own right. So the picture becomes the subject rather than, you know, the event that’s being documented being the subject. This is one of those great conundrums for photographers. I organised for Simone to visit me in my studio. We had a conversation, I said ‘Well look, what are you working on at the moment?’ She was preparing to conduct the Rosenkavalier, the Richard Strauss. And I said, ‘Oh well, you know, why don’t we put it on and why don’t you conduct to the music?’ I said, ‘You know, it’s strange, of course.’ And she said, ‘It’s very strange, because I lead, whereas if I listen to a recording and try to conduct, I’m following the recording.’ And I said, ‘Well it might be interesting for you, let’s give it a go.’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, the only recording that I really have been listening to carefully is by Erich Kleiber, and, you know, you’re not going to have that.’ And I go, ‘Well here it is.’
She got into it, and she started conducting and I was just taking pictures and we kept going and we kept going and we both got quite a good sweat up. In fact in the end we – she conducted the whole opera. Like, we were having a lot of fun. She was like, going off and I just kept shooting it and shooting it and shooting it and at the end of it like a normal session that I would do with one of my models, it was like both people are kind of exhausted and perspiring. And she packed up and caught a cab and I went back to the lab and started working on the pictures.
You know, there are lots of things that are interesting and they’re technically fine but you’re looking for that sort of special thing in a shoot, and so over the process of weeks, or months or years in some cases you narrow it down to those few images that you think are essential or that capture something, that are somehow compelling. And yeah, [I] narrowed it down to three. I couldn’t get it down to one. That’s how the process worked.
