Big ideas don't make them selves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I've done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.

A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.

The mobility of the eye is such a fundamental treasure that we have, and that coexists with sensation. On the dance floor, you are totally in reality, while also experiencing this dream imagery of changing colors and wet surfaces of skin. Sometimes it's the shadow outline in the strobe light, and in another moment it's the closeup of an armpit that you're looking into. I'm not photographing all the time, but it's something that I actually see all the time, and not just on the dance floor.

I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There's always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted.

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.