I didnt know photography would take me to the places that it has taken me.

I got my first camera when I was 21 – my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday – but at that point politics was my life, and I viewed the camera as a tool for expressing my political beliefs rather than as an art medium.

It’s very important for me to really use this body as a barometer of a certain kind of knowledge – to take the personal risk of exposing my own body in a certain kind of way. I can’t ask anybody else to do something that I don’t do first myself.

I don’t like directing a lot of people. So trying to keep things really simple and elegant is my preferred way of working.

The ideas I'm working with are ideas I'm committed to. I don't know how to soft-shoe them. I don't know how to make them more palpable. I just never knew how to be one of those girls. I wish I knew how to be that sometimes, but I don't know how to be that way.

In terms of digital photography, I continue to print and use film for the most part. I still shoot with film, 21/4 film specifically, and I love it. I love it because I know what it does, how it really responds to light.

It's impossible to change the social without changing the personal - you have to put your money where your mouth is. And if you're not making those challenges at home, it's unlikely you'll make them in a larger setting.

Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

It's fair to say that black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility - this too is part of the work, is indeed central to [my photographs]... This invisibility - this erasure out of the complex history of our life and time - is the greatest source of my longing.