You may change your profile picture to Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner, but you will never actually walk the streets the way they have, or systematically had your vertebrae stunted. So you will not walk that shrouded walk unless you're on the inside and you can occasionally nod at another on the inside and that acknowledgement can carry you for a while as it won't come from the outside.

Alliances, in the great cocktail party of the white man's world, are formed, almost purely, on this basis, for of both of you can laugh, you have a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other.

I realize after spending so long working with images, semiotic deconstruction and redeployment becomes second nature. We all speak with images. I guess I look at everything sideways nowadays.

Amazingly, my first project at Granta was the Sex issue. Given my own proclivity for the nuances of hedonistic and sexual exploration, partly through art, it was a perfect way to start. I love to interrogate through image - or pose questions through a subversion of said image - and we came up with a visual that caused quite a stir and went on to pick up a Design and Art Direction award.

It's odd. Though I've spent years working with and creating images, I feel most comfortable expressing myself through writing. I'd been in denial about this for many years. At school I was highly lauded as having the potential to write one day, but being a typically rebellious and misguided teenager I opted to study art. Ironically language has pervaded all the work I have done - from my first forays into an art practice many years ago to my work with typography and book design.

I was keen to challenge this vernacular as the role of the photojournalist was changing, and images were becoming urgent and more succinctly linguistic. This is why I moved to publishing artists who were challenging the veracity of both the medium and the profession through their works.

You may change your profile picture to Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner, but you will never actually walk the streets the way they have, or systematically had your vertebrae stunted. So you will not walk that shrouded walk unless you're on the inside and you can occasionally nod at another on the inside and that acknowledgement can carry you for a while as it won't come from the outside.