The problems for me in photography,
it is the photographic problem.
It confronts every photographer
is how to encompass within one exposure,
one small rectangle.
The whole complexity of the universe.
I think photography itself
has that documentary loaded carries.
They're still to this day regardless of Photoshop, etc.
I believe that photography should be telling you the truth.
I don't think I have enough imagination to invent situation.
I can invent rules of the game.
So I just need things to happen.
Sometimes it comes from,
the idea comes from an event in my life
that I need to take distance with and use.
Sometimes an idea comes from the other.
I follow somebody in Venice.
I can see this man I'm following in restaurant or in places
but I cannot see his hotel room
so I want to become a chambermaid
and I go back Venice to become a chambermaid.
I've always been intrigued by,
you know, when I sleep in a hotel room,
who was there in that bed exactly where I sleep the night before.
I've always had that fantasies when I find little objects left by somebody in the room.
I always go dreaming about it.
So it was natural for me to wander by these hotel rooms
the way people occupy it when after others' use.
I think that photography has for me been
the means by which I have come to deal with
being a South African during the years of Apartheid.
I somehow needed to to convey in photographs
how normal in an international sense,
life in Boksburg was,
and yet insanely at normal it was.
I don't really think of myself as a photographer.
I think of myself for the duration of that movie
that was this project like an actress taken on the role of a photographer.
I would walk into these houses
and he would be like these sets, big budgets sets,
there was this ghostly feeling of having them had studied
and memorized these roles and to perform for a camera
and they seem to be roles that were already written by someone else
and for no one in particular.
For the house to kind of be completed,
there needs to be a photographer.
It comes in and completed, you know.
I think we don't know anything about people.
When I follow the man, I was like his shadow and nothing.
It was me following him.
When I'm in the hotel room,
it's just like the mystery of the occupancy of a room.
It's not about people. We don't know anything.
What I tell is fictional by the simple way of editing.
You know my life, I have many lovers also.
I didn't
I have three story about love.
I didn't - I had more than three men in my life.
Making photographs demands on the one hand
that you see reality to the kind of coherence.
And on the other hand, it provides the opportunity, the license,
for looking at reality in ways that are not normally permitted to us.
I regard the work that I do as
being about the reality in which I live
and that reality is very complex
and I cannot begin to contain the complexity within a photograph.
So it's not about truth or reality. It's just -
I'm not trying to keep a diary of my life.
I'm trying to make art works.