If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be a certain way, to present a face to the world.

I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colorful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you're looking at is something totally opposite. It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

One reason I was interested in photography was to get away from the preciousness of the art object.

Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't.