Late in his life Richard Strauss was constantly being approached by adoring fans asking, “what is the story behind this music?” His reply was, “It’s just a piece of music.” Or, as Freud once noted, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Several years ago, I conducted a private workshop* with a student who was interested in learning how I photographed glamour models. I was lucky enough to be able to get the extraordinary model, Dawn Clifford, to pose for us and we shot in several locations, including the wonderfully daylight filled living where the featured image was made.

It’s been my experience that photographers get inspiration from many places. One of my friends finds it in old master’s paintings; I get the inspiration for some of my images from the movies.

I think manual mode is useful for those shooters who would rather drive a car with a stick shift than one with an automatic transmission. But while purists claim manual exposure mode is the only one to use, outdoors I tend to use all of the letters on the dial.

The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.”— Helmut Newton