Quotes from Mario Testino

My favourite words are possibilities, opportunities and curiosity. I think if you are curious, you create opportunities, and then if you open the doors, you create possibilities.

Ultimately, I made my range wider because I wanted to suit each publication that I worked for. Talk about reinvention - I'm like the Madonna of photography.

I have no real training in the history of fine art or furniture; my eye just works by proportions. I react intuitively. In London, it's all about color because the weather is so gray, and in that cold light they look beautiful.

Fine artists reflect, and then they act. Fashion photographers - we act, and then we reflect.

There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck to it, we're out, too.

Being Peruvian means to come from the farthest place possible to get to Europe. Peru is the land of the Incas. It was the capital of South America; it was where the Spanish founded their empire and took over the Inca Empire and made it into a colony of Spain.

I don't like a tormented photograph. Something attracts you in them, but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.

England is the country where I learned my profession. They are the ones that trained me, they are the ones that believed in me.

I adore being able to go to the Oscars and know every single person at the party afterwards.

You have to be you. You can't be anybody else. If you speak loudly, and people tell you to speak quietly, you can do it for a little bit, but loud people are loud, and people who are not, are not.

I've always had an affinity with women. It probably started with my mother when I was young, but it was intensified by my sister, Elena, who is one year older than me. I used to hang out with her all the time, and whenever I travelled, I used to buy her clothes and style her.

I have become aware on my travels that when a country loses the connection between its history and its traditional dress, something truly precious is lost.

I've been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.

In Los Angeles, individuality is very big, because people live in secluded bubbles. People don't walk around. They're very insular, and that allows for people to be whatever they want.

In the South America of the forties and fifties, everyone was into beauty and glamour and fashion.

There's a particular style that is very Peru that you don't see anywhere else; it's got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.

A fashion photographer is nothing without clothes and hair and makeup. And when I speak to other photographers, a lot of them can't reference a picture by the designer. Me, I say, 'The Balenciaga.' And I go to the shows. I feel like it's my business.

No! Beauty is emotional! That's why plastic surgery never works. Women who want to change their nose, lips, they don't understand that they are doing nothing except erasing their magic.

The more I photograph women, the less it is about transformation. Women are beautiful. All that really matters is enhancing that.

When you're nice, people like you and will want to work with you. But it can mean that they take you for granted.

I never notice a difference between photographing a man and a woman; for me, it's just somebody.

I am obsessed by people. Usually I try to get the girl out of the model instead of the model out of the girl.

I am obsessed with people and how to make them look their best.

I think my sense of color I have got from my upbringing in Peru.