2010, from Autobiography, in my iPad application Horvatland
I like to believe that Degas would have agreed with my choices of focal length and angle. He was himself a photographer, as one can tell from the composition of most of his paintings. I would even say that ‘he saw as through an 85mm lens’, in the sense that his perspectives are neither as dramatic as they would be with a wide-angle, nor as flat as with a tele-lens, but just noticeable – as with the lens I was using. Following a similar line of thought, I tried to shoot from the angle I observed in many of his paintings, by placing the camera slightly above the subject. When a sculptor works on a small piece, his eyes will naturally be a little higher than his hands, and he will tend to judge his work from that angle. I did the same for the lighting: I had found that the statuettes looked best when the light came from the right and I decided that Degas must have worked with the window of his studio at his right side – and most probably coming slightly from behind the sculpture.