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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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