I assumed from the outset that photography was already art, and that I and other people working in photography were artists. I understand now that this was a minority point of view.

Digital technology, you see, is not the villain here. It simply offers another dimension. I'm not sure if it's a farther remove from reality than analogue. I think if we can speak of reality, if reality and representation can be spoken of in the same sentence, if reality even exists any more, digital is simply another way of encoding that reality.

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

I never had any ambition to do anything commercial, anything journalistic. I wanted to be an artist, and I wanted to be an artist whose work was done in the medium of photography. It may be debatable to this day whether I ever succeeded in achieving that ambition, but the point is, I never had any uncertainty about that.

The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.

I believed it was necessary to investigate photography, dismantle it, jettison all the non-essential components, and begin again with a stripped down but more powerful idea of what is, or could be photographic.

Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.