My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

Usually people just do their own work. But I want to deal with the place and what it means to show in a mental hospital.

In '83 I started travelling round Europe with my slide show. It wasn't until I moved to Europe and got accepted in a big way in Berlin in the '90s that I got acceptance by the big art world in New York. I didn't really get to be known, or in the market, til '93 in New York.

I was recently interviewed for radio in relation to the "Thanksgiving" show [2001] at the Saatchi gallery that I was part of. The interviewer said that people in London were very disturbed that I showed a picture of myself battered ("Nan One Month after Being Battered", 1984) and they thought that I set it up. I was accused of deliberately putting on a wig for that particular picture.

There are days when everyone in the world looks like a Diane Arbus to me. She's a genius but her work is completely different to mine. But on those days I don't use my camera.

Stella McCartney is [my] big fan.

I like Stella [McCartney] a lot - she's a very open and warm person. I don't particularly want to know about her background.