When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the informed-consent question was answerable.
But empirically I've come to understand that my photographs really don't do any harm.
I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.
I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete, I suppose. But it's a naivete that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.
The images I like best are parts of series that I've started, in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy.
A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a tiny sliver of the population.
If somebody's pointing a trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing that, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in there.
Some of the people that I photographed as sticks became much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I think they're even more beautiful.
