Working in fashion
As a teenager, fashion photography didn't appeal to me. I found it very conservative, and not really relevant to people of my age group who were buying clothes. The images were very high drama, black and white, grainy, glamorous images of people where the fantasy was that they had lots of money and they were very romantic - and they were really just naff. They were hamming it up in a lifestyle that didn't really exist, and if it did, my generation didn't want to know about it.

Angst and attitude
Then a lot of the high fashion magazines came along, such as ID, The Face and Blitz which started to challenge those ideas about fashion photography and speak to that generation that hadn't been addressed before. So that's where people like Nick Knight brought in the really contrasty images - images full of angst and attitude. And that was, for me, the first kind of imagery that, along with a few other photographers, expressed what was going on for my generation.

I suppose I wanted to work in fashion photography for the same reason a lot of photographers do, and that is because you can bring alive a fantasy. In documentary, in portraiture and other commercial realms of photography, you can't do that - you can't really get as much control as you can within the fashion image.

Commercial fashion photography
Fashion images come in two different categories. The first is the fashion advertisement, which is on all the billboards, buses, bus stands and in the magazines. And it's normally shot in a similar way to the way you shoot editorial spreads, only, obviously, you're being paid by, Levi's or Gucci or Prada to create that image. And, you know, those images cost a lot more money to produce, there's a lot more jobs riding on those images, and they are very, very intense and quite difficult to do.

Editorial fashion photography
Now, the creative side of fashion photography is another side to fashion photography, which is editorial photography. They are images that are commissioned by a magazine. Ideally, they create a story around characters and they have clothes in there that complement that idea. So, in the ideal world, a fashion story is an outlet for a photographer to be very creative, experiment with their ideas, collaborate with a really great stylist and, hopefully attract potential advertisers. That's the purpose it serves for the magazine, so everybody's happy.

Fashion photography and fine art
I think that fashion photography is increasingly seen to be more credible in terms of creativity. There's certainly been a kind of crossing of the boundaries between fine art and fashion, maybe in the last ten years. And, in the last two years, there are so many magazines available that are, more experimental, that the boundaries are being blurred so much now that people can't really identify what the difference is any more, other than the original reason for creating the image.

Shooting Mosh
I did a story for The Face about, maybe three or four years ago - they called it Mosh. It was a story that involved about 60 or 70 kids. And the idea for it was that we get all these kids to do stage diving and crowd surfing. Meanwhile, I just zoom in and focus in on the clothes while this action was taking place.

So what myself and the stylist did was give out fliers in the kind of clubs where kids get up to stage diving, saying, "Please come to a fashion shoot for The Face. You'll be expected to wear certain clothes and there'll be a live band and you'll be expected to dance… there'll be free beer... And it'll happen on this date, in this club." So, we got a live band and did all the things that we said we'd do.

We had a great massive jumble sale of clothes, for these kids to just pick out what they wanted, fling on and it was getting down to the point where, the shoot was about to start and the band were warming up, and I was thinking, "Oh my God, they're all sitting around, what am I supposed to do if they won't dance?"

Anyway, as soon as the band just hit the drums once, the whole lot of them flew right up to the stage, and they just went mental - it was like a sea of colourful clothes moving… I was just there like a fly on the wall. I didn't have to give any art direction, it was the easiest shoot I've done.

That girl and that seagull
The girl with the seagull was one of those images that we never knew whether we'd got it or not, because we had to shoot in on 35 mil and it was so spontaneous that we couldn't set up the lights Prior to doing it, there'd been incidents where people had been attacked by seagulls whilst eating.

My boyfriend lived in Brighton and he used to take me to the pier every Sunday and we used to feed the seagulls doughnuts. It was just one of those things that people do, but I'd never really seen it in photographs. We wanted the photograph to be tough, we wanted it to be magical, and we wanted it to be silly, and I think we managed to get all of those elements in through those characters and what they did.

Ideas
I come up with ideas lots of different ways. It could be a photographic image - I could see one photographic image from, say, the '70s or '80s and be so compelled by that image that I can kind of work out a character that could be like that person in that image, and build up a life around that. It definitely starts that way rather than starting with a skirt or a bag. There's no way I'd ever go out and go, "Oh, that skirt's so great, it's inspired me to do XYZ with it." I could come up with a story idea through seeing a film, or I could meet someone who is really animated and silly, want to be with them, want to be like them, therefore the best thing to do is to cast them and hope that they give to the pages of the magazine what they give to me when I meet them.

Working with models
I used to spend weeks casting for a job. Now I don't get that kind of time, so the thing I do now is go to the model agency and say, "Can you cast for me, on video, can you ask every person to tell you their most embarrassing story, to do their most embarrassing dance and to just tell a joke or something,"' just to get an idea of what kind of character they are. Because there's been quite a lot of occasions in the past, where I've booked models by just seeing their card or just seeing their book, and they've got on a shoot and they can't do anything. They're so paranoid about their best side, about whether they think this is the right thing for them to do. So, I just want to check that before anybody gets to the shoot, they have the kind of personality that can handle that intense art direction.

Boring faces and precious attitudes
For me, it's about how fresh the model is and how they deal with the sort of questions I ask them, how they perform. The most boring kind of faces are the ones that don't move and look like they take themselves too seriously. And, unfortunately, they are always the most good-looking people.

Over exposure
I also have a problem with people who are in too many magazines at once, because I think it's really boring and predictable. It's got to a point where I've had to turn down work, you know, big campaigns and big editorials, because I can't face the prospect of having to plead with big models, who are probably more powerful than I am on a shoot, to do the things that I want them to do.

Another reason why I don't really want to use very familiar faces is because the fantasy I'm trying to create is a real one. And a lot of the times, I think that if you look at a set of images, you will identify with the famous element in those images before you will the fantasy.

Mood
The first thing I try and do is make sure that everybody is totally familiar with everybody else. There's no way I would go into a shoot cold. There's always a point where you've spent a little time with everyone, made sure they all know who does what on the shoot and feel comfortable with these people. I mean, a lot of the time, you can get a girl who's 16 or 17 years old, who's never done a shoot in her life before and they've come from another country, they might not even speak our language.

So it is a situation that is quite delicate, especially, with the kind of art direction I do with people - it's not exactly subtle. So, we might first start off by all being silly and dancing and throwing food at each other, or whatever. In a situation where there's a lot of people, there can't be any holding back - it has to be totally open.

Shooting outdoors
I think shooting outside represents a sort of element of freedom of youth, and it's the time when you're outside, you're away from the eye of your parents and hopefully from any grown ups. And you can do what you like. And that is basically the sort of running theme through all my images. I'm so obsessed with the idea of getting on a bike and riding off, because the second you're on a bike, you're away from your mum and dad and what they can see you doing, and you could be, like, five miles away from home and the world's yours.

Stills - the square fantasy
I think what's special about a photograph in our age of technology, where everything's moving so fast and we can access imagery on the Internet and email and God knows what, is that the photograph is still tangible. You can see it at any time, no matter whether you've got electricity or batteries, you've always got it there to look at. It'll always be something that will go on your wall or, you can just stare at for ages and absorb yourself within that square fantasy.