Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.

My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

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.

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.

The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.

What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.