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.

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.

It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.

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.

Sometimes it takes a long time for a picture to incubate. And every time I do that, the rewards are so much bigger than what I would have gotten if I had only done the same as I always do. So each time I make an effort and I get out of a lazy routine, it's amazing how big the reward can be. It's listening to those little ideas knocking on the door in your mind.

I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.

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.