I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever I use men, they're so scary and so dark, and I can never find this sort of lightness or this place between doll and human that I find with female dolls.

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

When you're getting ready, you finally reach a point where your clothes are right and your hair and makeup are right, and you're not comparing yourself to anyone. It's a really great moment. Then you get to the party and it's like, "Oh my god, I'm wearing the wrong thing! I'm garish!" or "I'm underdressed!"

I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really enjoy it. It's important to me to have men inside there, too, because so many dollers are men. It's putting me into a pretty odd headspace, the shooting, because I understand the motivation of these dollers to dress up. There's a way that you start to prefer the reality of that world to your own world. It's so much more beautiful.

I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes. Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them. That's something I really wanted to get out there right away.