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.

Find the most puzzling kind of art you can think of, and then go out and try to approximate it with your camera. Take a photograph that corresponds to it. (Assignment to students.)

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?

I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be.

Most of my friends are women. I think women are more interesting to talk to.

Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.