Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy's jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image - all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.

Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology.

Like a ventriloquist who laughs at his dummy's jokes, I keep trying to make photographs that seduce me into believing in the image - all the time knowing better, but believing anyway.

...I think finding that room to make pictures that don't jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, that's the challenge.

I'm very interested in making the photographs look real, but a lot of them are highly synthetic. They're hybrids, located somewhere between the found and the constructed.

Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging.... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.

Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.