[Photography] ties back into this feeling of wanting to watch things fall and the moment before they break. Fireworks are that way for me - this lovely thing that blows up and is gone. It all goes back to this desire to record things before they disappear - the original reason we take pictures, right?

Every time I hear that somebody died I think of their body, on a steel table in a morgue somewhere. I think of how they can do nothing about it.

If you can see a thing you don't have anymore it's very heartbreaking. To hold onto things longer than we actually can hold onto them is a desire. Writers and artists are trying to record these things they can no longer have. We're a heartbroken lot. Taking pictures is a brave act in which you try to explain and remember a thing you can't have anymore.

I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.

I'm more interested in the idea of role-playing in general than the idea of role-playing in art. I like the childlike quality of making pretend or the optimistic idea of pretending something's happening when it's not.

Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

I feel like I'm at a place in my life where I'm really strangely happy, and in awe of how great the world can be, and I think that's because I have gone through periods of looking at the world through a really melancholy lenses. It's all just flip sides of the same coin.