I didn't think of what I was doing as political. To me it was a way to make the best out of what I liked to do privately, which was to dress up.

My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he'd talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even.

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.

Nowadays, with digital printing, it's so easy to make everything perfect, which is not always a good idea. Sometimes the mistakes are really what make a piece.

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 feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.

Some people have told me they remember the film that one of my images is derived from, but in fact I had no film in mind at all.