The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.
My work is aimed at creating a world in which I wish to live. Consequently, it is about creating ideals with the aid of realistic techniques. My most fundamental motivation is a desire for unity, fusion and sense of community.
For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.
I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.
What I'm interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
Big ideas don't make them selves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I've done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.
Always take yourself seriously... it's not the same as being pompous, or overly self-assured, but it is important to understand that the small little ideas that creep up in your mind, often contain the germ of a much larger project. All great art wasn't born as great art. It first needed to be recognized by the artist him/herself. Through his or her belief in it, it became true.
I see my practice as picture making. Whatever is available, I use.
I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.
To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.
There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.
I heard this wonderful quote - "Only the brave show what they love." It's so-embarrassing to approach somebody and say you want to look at them. But without that risk taking, nothing can happen, so I have to make myself vulnerable. What I think is the unifying aspect in people that I like is that they have a sense of their own vulnerability, and I respond to that.
This ongoing coexistence which makes life sensational. The eyes have this ability to flip around what they see from one second to another, to see something as an object, and then as a design. That's really liberating, and I try to convey that in my work, that your eyes are free and you are free to use them.
What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.
I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.
I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork
I always think that we know so much more than one would have ever known before. But I don't know if that's really true.
I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There's always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted.
My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.
The mobility of the eye is such a fundamental treasure that we have, and that coexists with sensation. On the dance floor, you are totally in reality, while also experiencing this dream imagery of changing colors and wet surfaces of skin. Sometimes it's the shadow outline in the strobe light, and in another moment it's the closeup of an armpit that you're looking into. I'm not photographing all the time, but it's something that I actually see all the time, and not just on the dance floor.
The picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done.
A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.
It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.
Growing up in the '80s, questions of style and music and youth culture all seemed inherently political - like gay rights issues, dressing up, wearing makeup, arms protests. A lot of attitude and opinions were expressed through clothes, and they all were meaningful. So in that way, I was so excited about the connection between our private lives and politics - who I kiss, how I like to dance.
Sometimes it takes a long time for a picture to incubate. And every time I do that, the rewards are so much bigger than what I would have gotten if I had only done the same as I always do. So each time I make an effort and I get out of a lazy routine, it's amazing how big the reward can be. It's listening to those little ideas knocking on the door in your mind.
