I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.

I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.

What I try to do is reinvigorate strategies and clichés I find in Hollywood movies. At a certain point I had these huge folders, each one classified according to subject matter or genre: people with guns, people kissing, Indians and cowboys falling off horses, getting shot, getting shot with arrows - almost every plot device. Then I cropped the cheap, recycled imagery to give exhausted images new meaning, or at least something other than their original meaning. I'm basically reassembling atoms to give them a meaning that's more au courant.

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

I didn't see painters doing paintings of glassware and glass shelves or sand dunes and receding snow fences. Why does that interest photographers and not artists?

Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?