My images are not images of reality, but show a kind of second reality, the image of the image.

I received my training at an art academy, so what I produce is art. That's what is artistic about my photographs.

I believe that photography can only reproduce the surface of things. The same applies to a portrait. I take photographs of people the same way I would take photographs of a plaster bust.

The people have to know what my portraits are like in order to behave in such a way that the result is one of my portraits.

Photographs are still always depictions, it's just that for my generation the model for the photograph is probably not reality any more, but images we have of that reality.

If you look at photographers who say, "I hate digital photography," they all use Photoshop, even if it's to make the sky just a little more blue than it was. Manipulation is very discrete and because it's so discrete nobody cares about it anymore. People accept manipulated photographs, I think.

I'm very old fashioned. I still believe in the image and the pictorial quality of the image. It seems that I'm still busy with a truth in photography.