My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures

It's about finding meaning through light. I'm always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.

I really love that dynamic between beauty and sadness...theres always these moments of quiet alienation, the sense of disconnect, but also, these moments of possibility.

I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire

What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that's internal.

It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery.

The viewer is more likely to project their own narrative onto the picture.

He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.

To achieve a higher consciousness, fill your heart with love and forget to judge, compete, or compare.

Life gives you what you are deeply longing for.

Trust in Allah but tie your camel first.

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

I like understanding what's underneath, what's really motivating people. When I was younger, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, so I think it has to do with that.

Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.

Everything that is fear cannot be love, and everything that is love cannot be fear.