« The idea of referring to famous master-pieces probably came to me from a thought that had often crossed my mind – on the subway, for instance – when glancing at some woman who struck me as particularly beautiful, but who didn’t seem conscious of her beauty, and whom a fashion editor would never have allowed me to photograph for a magazine, although I could easily imagine her in a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens or Ingres. I visualised them in the costume and with the hairstyle of one of those periods, or even naked in some mythological scene: partly because I like fantasising about …