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.

I always think that we know so much more than one would have ever known before. But I don't know if that's really true.

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 picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done.

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.

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.

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.