'relaxin' with Sofia Coppola' - relax For Girls November 2003

This time, we speak to Sofia Coppola not as a film director, but as a photographer.

Photos: Sofia Coppola
Interview and text: Aya Muto

Aya Muto (AM): When did you first become interested in taking photographs?

Sofia Coppola (SC): When I was a teenager, I was always really interested in fashion photography and fashion magazines. Then one day, my mother gave me an original photographic print as a present, and that inspired me to start collecting photographic prints.

AM: Whose print was it?

SC: William Klein. She gave me one of his fashion photographs from the 1950s. After that, I started becoming interested in all sorts of different styles of photography. Actually, just recently I found some negatives of these terrible fashion photographs I took when I was about twelve, with Stephanie, who I now work with on MILKFED. (Laughs.) I had dressed her in my mother’s fur coat and used a desk lamp for lighting. They were really cheap-looking, awful pictures. (Laughs.) But I suppose even as a child I was interested enough in fashion photography to try to recreate those kinds of setups. I didn’t really become interested in taking photographs myself until I was a little older. I had a really good photography teacher at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I’d originally been studying painting, but I was terrible at it. Once I started taking photography classes, I was really drawn to the immediacy of photography, something that painting doesn’t have.