Here are excerpts from a recent interview with the author of ILLUMINATIONS. If you have your own comments or questions, we will forward them to him and hope to publish some of your Q&A's on this website in coming weeks.

Q: When and why did you start photographing the nude?
A: It began rather casually in 1982 when I took a weekend workshop on the nude. I had already been a photographer for a long time, but had never done nudes, and this seemed a kind of whim. Little did I know how far it would take me. Now, I'm being invited to conduct workshops. There are also deeper personal reasons for this project, which I explain in the opening text section of ILLUMINATIONS.

Q: Have you done men as well as women?
A: Yes, but not as many. The shapes and skin surfaces that fit my vision of the beautiful seem more often to be female -- the classic young and slender, yes, but then really of all ages and body types. One of my dealers, the Photographer's Gallery in Palo Alto, California currently has a number of my male nudes. But there aren't any in the book; I took them out late in the editing for purposes of unity and coherence of the book as a work of art in itself.

Q: Where do you find your models?
A. Various ways. Occasionally body professionals, such as dancers or yoga teachers, want to trade modelling for pictures to use for their own personal or professional reasons. More often, I found models through a guild or agency of people who model for art classes. I never hire fashion or Playboy-type "glamour" models: they have exaggerated or stylized habits of posing, and anyway they are much too expensive.

Q: Do you or others have moral concerns about this project?
A. I don't. Some others may. America has some deep Puritan traditions, which is something I respect and understand. For instance, I did a book some years ago on the rural Middle West addressing that God-fearing region as a seedbed of the American character.

To me, it's all a matter of attitude, tone, approach. Pornography is depressing, dispiriting, because it leaves out love. But some of the greatest art in history has utilized the nude, from the Greeks through the Renaissance and up to the present in the Western tradition, and in many other traditions, such as Africa and the Orient. This includes religious painters such as Rubens. I address and respect my models as human beings and co-creators of the work. Although some are a bit fearful at first, they end up feeling good about the experience, enriched and celebrated for their beingness, which is the overall purpose of the project in both its pursuit and its results.

Q: Do you have sketches or a prior plan before the session starts?
A. Essentially, no. I do do a lot of prior work on the studio lighting -- awareness and control of light is the key thing in photographing the nude. Mine isn't tricky -- I'm only working in black and white, for one thing. But it's sensitive and careful and intentional. I usually have two basic lighting setups; the sessions run two hours, with a break, and I have time to change to the second setup during the break.

We usually warm up with a few generalized movements and poses, with little or no shooting. This helps establish a nice dialogue, lets naturalness emerge, and gets me started visualizing the interesting harmonies and accents about this particular body. Then we work hard, usually with a lot of small variations on a limited number of poses. How much guidance and direction I give depends a lot on how much the model seems to want. I am more reactive to the situation than imposing my will.

In advance, though: careful observation and experience of how light of various qualities affects skin of various colors and qualities, and knowing how this can be interpreted on films and photo papers -- this is the essential preparation. In my book, ILLUMINATIONS, in one of the diary entries, I make the statement that, for the photographer, "Light is paint."

Plus, working on yourself honestly, your own attitudes and reasons for undertaking this work. I try to leave half an hour clear for meditation just before a session starts, to clear away the surface scatter of technical details and tune into the deeper wellsprings of why we're here.