“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,”
“I take pictures almost every day. I have to do it. It’s like writing, I write in a diary every day too,”
“I’m so private as a person that it helps me to figure things out.”
“I am very free in my style but I am very intentional as an artist about what I want to capture: it’s all in the quotidian. It’s elevating the quotidian. While I use photographs to examine my own life, I also feel like those pictures make people feel like their own lives are beautiful, in a way. Because they’re all about something everyone can relate to, they’re like self portraits: there’s pictures of me rearranging my underwear drawer, there’s friends in swimming pools, it’s all very quotidian things that I’m interested in. But I like finding that moment of mystery – I know exactly when I’ve seen it. It’s a kind of eternal feeling.”
“I actually think photography can become a way of life. If you look carefully, you just see beauty – things become more beautiful. In a way it’s holding onto things. But I was just reading this interview with Nan Goldin, a pretty famous quote of hers: ‘I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.’ And it’s true, you can never get that moment back but really, these are a vain attempt at trying.”
“I just set them up on a table and use a self-timer. There’s never anyone in the room. I actually feel like I photograph terribly and I’m the only person that can photograph me as myself. It’s something I feel really private about. But then I print them, which is such a contradiction! I suppose I like attention but only on my own terms. I don’t like the idea of having attention that was highly controlled. It’s a way of showing myself to myself. Only through these pictures do I get to really see what I actually look like. Because it’s so skewed when you look in a mirror.”