It's pretentious to say, but my art is like a little Zen story, a story with a question mark at the end. People can take from it what they need. If somebody says, "Your art is very funny," I say, "You are totally right." If somebody says, "Your art is very sad," I say, "You are totally right." In Japan they say, "Your art is very Japanese, you even look Japanese.Your great-grandfather was most surely a Japanese man." And I say, "You are totally right."

You are what you are because your parents made love at that exact moment, and if they made love one second after you would be different. The fact that you were born means that there are no other children born because of you - you've killed them in a way. Is it destiny? Was it written somewhere that this was to be your life? Is it useful that you are here? Or is it simply by chance?

Every time I ask questions about sex, I always end up asking questions about death.

The photo replaces the memory. When someone dies, after a while you can't visualize them anymore, you only remember them through their pictures.

We all die twice - once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.

In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.

I believe that at the beginning of the life of every artist there is some kind of trauma. We have a problem and all of our life we try to speak about this problem. My trauma was historical. When I was three or four, all the friends of my parents were survivors of the Holocaust; they spoke a lot about that. My father was hiding during the war, it was something totally present when I was a boy. It is sure that it has made me.