I don't want to sound mystical but sometimes when you take a picture - when the sets are in place - then something takes over and leads you. It's this sense of extraordinary luck and chance. The shoot is blessed and charmed, and you make pictures that you couldn't in your wildest dreams have imagined. That is the magic of photography.

Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now.

I know the world that I am painting is not a reality. It is a whim, an entertainment to provoke something in people, whether as escapism or relief. I think that is very valid.

I like capturing stuff that is disappearing - that’s the point of photography. What I am photographing is an imaginary place that never existed, but is connected to something that has already been.

I've never been in love with fashion, actually; trends and catwalks don't interest me. I love clothes; I love them historically and currently. They represent a spirit of the times and the zeitgeist.

The point of fashion is that you take the picture you want. And fashion is the only photography that allows fantasy, and I'm a fantasist.

Fantasy isn't something I put into the pictures; I don't try and inject them with a sense of play. But it's about being an honest photographer; a photograph is as much of a mirror of the photographer as it is the subject.