We create these walls between fact and fiction, but often the difference between the two is as little as that between a real name and a pseudonym. So I'm not sure about those walls - certainly not in the realm of visual arts.

We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.

What people that are professionals in the art world - both in literature and the other arts - always try to do is to recognize the feasibility of making the transition from the particular to the general - to make the transition from the portrait of one postman - to take Van Gogh, for example, to something that is every postman. That synecdotal transition that most selfies don't make. But we who live in this world, and not simply in our private realities, understand that that's the transition our art has to make.

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

I think it's terribly important to reach out and understand all the different types of life and the different types of challenges that are present around the world. And I think the more people who can do that the better our planet will probably be.

There's an awful lot of work being done that no one ever sees, or that is only seen in the gallery world. I feel that the public are losing touch with the great stuff that's being done in photography.

Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.