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.

My mom just recently reminded me that I used to build these little miniature worlds outside at our country house and populate it with little figures.That whole thing [shooting is] about trying to create a world - there's something very connected to childhood and reverie and daydreaming and fantasy.

In "Twilight," the narratives are more literal, and the event is much more spectacular. The pictures in "Beneath the Roses" are much more psychological and grounded in reality.

Originally, one of the reasons I was drawn to photography, as opposed to painting or sculpture or installation, is that of all the arts it is the most democratic, in so far as it's instantly readable and accessible to our culture. Photography is how we move information back and forth.

I think maybe the figures - that's a good word - the figures in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection.

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.