This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe coming closer together, and nightlife and techno and ecstasy culture seemed like a very powerful panEuropean movement.

Now there is such a closed loop between realness and commercialism that one has to question why do more and more and more of those pictures. It's almost like everybody deserves a book about themselves, and everybody deserves a whole issue of Vice magazine devoted to them.

I find fashion magazines so incredibly boring . . . There still is no new photography and no new concerns.

To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.

The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.

Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure. Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.