WT: Because they can’t be achieved any other way. I’ve never been afraid of being of my time, and I often find it problematic when people try to avoid that in order to achieve timelessness. They cut themselves short in the process. All great art is strongly linked to its time. The paradox is how to achieve that universality while acknowledging specificity. It’s quite hard to handle, this open-endedness. The lack of clear answers, handling the contradictions, not thinking, and yet not giving up either. Not going the easier route of pretending that there are simple answers.

I admire other artists that work in very strict patterns, but it’s interesting to note how that strictness or seriality is often associated with seriousness in our culture, with more thought and more depth. I find it more challenging to try to reconcile all those different fields that constitute experience as I live it day to day.

WT: I like the idea of the photograph as something that joins me to the world, that connects me to others, that I can share. I can get in touch with somebody when they recognize a feeling: “Oh, I felt like that before. I remember jeans hanging on the banister, even though I’ve never seen that exact pair. I’ve seen my oranges on a windowsill.” It’s the sense that “I’m not alone.” That’s the driving force behind sharing these things—that I want to find connections in people. I believe that every thought and idea has to be somehow rendered through personal experience, and then generalized.

WT: I certainly feel a responsibility when using my power to utilize media of any sort, such as an exhibition. I’ve always felt very strongly that whatever I do involves using a position of privilege and power, because I’m the one that’s talking. But I’ve also thought that my point of view deserved to be heard, because I always felt that neither I nor the way that I look at the world was adequately represented. That of course changes, and we’re now living in a completely different image world than we were ten years ago.

GB: One of the fundamental impulses for any portraitist, especially apparent in your work, is to approach experience, to make sense of what we experience and the people in our lives. Photography, because it’s so accurate in its registration, always contains the implicit hope that we can somehow obtain a vestige of proof, of knowledge: this is how things are, this is what exists, what I know. We live in hope, but it’s an absurd hope, because as soon as you move toward that or try to build on it in pictures, you automatically begin to assert a control over the situation that prevents it from ever being anything beyond your own preconceived ideas. And so for you, it’s vital to maintain that position of vulnerability.

“Now, more than ever, you can’t help but get up in the morning and connect to what’s happening around you, the changes in the world that are happening every day. At the moment, the future is hard to predict – planning is impossible. So the present has become all the more important. People seem to be gaining a better appreciation of things – time, nature, books, music, art, flowers, cooking a good meal. Friends, family, loved ones – simple pleasures. Most importantly, real freedom, equality and justice. We are finding ourselves much more in the moment, mentally. We definitely don’t want to waste time any more, but want to live life fully, to do what we can to improve the world. It’s a ‘new now’ that requires new ideas, a new way of thinking. We’ve never found it necessary to look back – our job is to create something new. It’s about living in the right now.”