I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense... This is what drives you to the next picture.

What's important to me is that there's a necessary alienation between me and the subject. I don't want to know them well. I don't want to have any intimate contact with them.

I don't deliberately look for something dark or bleak or disconnected, in fact that's not something I'm even conscious of in the work as I'm making it. I'm always trying to create beauty, reveal hope, show the sense of longing that exists in isolation and loneliness, and capture the search for something greater inside all of my subjects.

All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.

I was never conscious of filming except for when I was location scouting. In a way, that is the most important part of the entire process - and the most private. I'm so used to doing that alone. Unlike every other part, it's just me, alone, on location.It's very hard to describe what I'm looking for - something that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It's not enough for it just to be strange or mysterious, it also has to feel very ordinary, very familiar, and very nondescript.

We all strive to find moments of clarity, of order.