What makes a Paul Smith?
I guess the best way to describe my images would be that most of them have a sense of irony behind them. It's important to me that there is an edge of humour within the work and hopefully that comes through. But behind that humour there's also a salient message that I'm trying get across and whether this always reaches the audience, or whether they just see the humorous side is irrelevant. Sometimes, I just like to create a picture that people enjoy looking at.

Army roots
The point that I first got interested in photography really was when I was about 16 and I joined the army. I didn't join the army to become a photographer, but I joined the army really because I wanted to be a diver, do something adventurous. So I joined, spent a year training and then I was sent to Germany. Once I arrived in Germany I found that the role as a soldier was actually quite dull.

So in the peace time role I started picking up a camera, and documented activities that were going on around me. One of the officers I was dealing with saw my images then asked me if I wanted the job as a photographer, which was a fantastic break. I was then given a camera and a studio and all the equipment I needed, the images I was taking were suddenly going into several newspapers, magazines, and I became a photographer.

It was only when I left the army in 1990 and I went on to art college and did a foundation course, a degree, and then an MA in photography, that it really came to the point where I 'd matured in the way I was photographing. I'd developed a particular style that's resulted in the images that you see now.

Provoking reaction
There are so many different reactions you can have to a photograph that I think in my work if someone smiles and laughs at it, that's a great reaction. Other pictures I've taken in the past have quite repulsed people - and that has its own merits. I don't want every picture to create the same feeling and mood when you look at it.

I'm not trying to dictate an answer to the question. I try and get people to think about the world around them and in my case, it's thinking about the way that men are represented.

Masculinity
In my photographs I tend to look at masculinity, male identity, male machismo - the way that we choose to present males. I've been in the army and being in the army makes people think of you in a certain way. I was also - in childhood - a keen fan of people like James Bond and Bruce Willis and actions films and I think that sets a precedent for us to live up to. That's what I like tackling and playing with in my pictures.

Some of my earlier work angers people because it glorifies war. Then with drinking games, I produced images of me vomiting around the toilet bowl, but when people look at it, they actually feel physically sick. It's a picture that no one wants to own themselves. And there are other images that people look at and instantly crack into laughter, such as me standing there with a cucumber, rather well modelled. People tend to look at it and smile, and think it's quite amusing - what's he doing, what's it all about? And it gets people thinking.

Image manipulation
The first time I really encountered a computer and started manipulating the image by computer was when I was on my degree course and suddenly the college ended up getting two Mac's with an early version of Photoshop. In my own spare time, I started investigating really. After a bit of experimenting, I realised vast amounts of potential for the way that I was planning to work.

The biggest break came to me when I realised that you could output directly from the computer onto a negative, something that a lot of people have no idea about. It's not an easy process and it's not necessarily a cheap one, but it creates a negative that is equivalent quality to any other negative that you get, and of course you've got infinite advantage in that if you mess the negative up, scratch the negative or you're not happy with things, you can just do another one.

Working with computers
One of the great advantages with working in the way that I do is the fact that I shoot a lot of film. I shoot four or five rolls for each element that I want in the picture, so you can create 50 or 60 potential pictures. I then pluck one or two of the ones that I really like and I scan those in. Once they're scanned in, again if there's something I don't like about the picture, I've still got the opportunity to change it.

The computer gives us such a vast array of tools to play with that if I want a different colour in the skyline I can just colour a pane of glass and create my own colour. If I want that helicopter to be bigger, smaller, if I want to get rid of a part of it, if I want the rotor blades to look blurred, if I want myself to look bigger in the frame, I've got the opportunity to change that and that gives another dimension to actually creating the image and loosens it up a bit.

But are they photographs?
The images I produce are digital images so questions are immediately thrown up about whether or not they can seen as photographs, because essentially they're a collage of separate elements that have been placed together very accurately. So far, there doesn't seem to be a sort of separate category for people creating digital images, so the way I'm working I think is very hard to pin down as photography.

Manipulating and playing with images is something that we've seen throughout the history of photography really. When I was at college I saw a fantastic photograph, which was a composite picture of about 32 different negatives, all printed together to create a seamless image of an orgy at the time. When cameras were first invented, they obviously didn't have the speed of film that we have now, so every picture had to be posed and had to be carefully instructed to allow the photographer to actually take the picture in the first place. So I don't think computers had suddenly invented this idea of constructing the image - just the ability to do it in a more convincing way.

Photographic developments
Now that computers are such an important part of photography, I think they're giving an another extension to photography. We've seen massive developments in photography, we've seen the shift from a plate camera, through to black and white film, stock film, through to colour film, through to good colour film, Polaroid film and now into digital pixel image. I do think that the amount of people shooting on film will reduce - and massively - over the years, but the quality you get from a digital camera, unless you get a very high end one, still doesn't compare to film. So people will stick with film until the qualities match.

Pixel v bromide
People realise that it's cheaper to shoot with digital, because once they've resolved the fact that it drains loads of batteries, the cost of it is virtually insignificant. You can take 28 shots, look at them instantly, wipe out the ones you don't like and then shoot more, without ever having to change the film. And that's a fantastic break for photographers. But saying that, it's going to be a long time before we see major gallery images changing to digital, because as soon as you blow anything like a digital image up to that scale, it loses so much quality that it's disappointing usually, which is why I shoot roll film, then have it scanned, then manipulate it digitally, then output it.

War, death and Robert Capa
The first series of work I did was called Artist Rifles - it was based on the army. One of the biggest influences for me was an image that was out and all over the press at the time, by Robert Capa from the Spanish Civil war. And the shot is a man in the moment of death, where the bullet was going through his head. The reason that I found this picture so fascinating was because a lot of people doubted whether or not it really was the moment of death. But when I looked at that, it wasn't important to me whether it was real or whether it was faked. What was important for me was what it represented. And it represented war. It represented a horrific image of war.

Distorting reality
There's been a lot of debate for a long time about what is a real photograph. Obviously if you're a documentary photographer you're supposedly catching the moment of reality but it's very difficult to work out what that moment of reality is. If you're taking a war photograph, you might move a body to make it look more interesting, or add something to the picture to make it look a more of interesting and then you start to blur the boundaries of what is an authentic documentary image and what is constructed. I guess my images push that boundary to quite an extreme, where they are completely constructed yet they allude to the original idea of documentary to make it look like they're an original document.

Editing reality
A photograph by its very nature has to distort reality. Its frame cuts out a piece of the world and as soon as you make a conscious decision to put a camera in front of your eye and point it in a certain direction, then you're obviously excluding the rest of reality, so you can create a very simple story by the use of the frame and that can differ immensely. You can put two photographers together and ask two of them to document the same subject matter and they create completely different images. And part of the reason for that is because they want to put their own perspective across.

Photographer's blues
One of the biggest problems I have being a photographer is I'm almost held back when I take snaps. I find it so difficult to now go on holiday and just comfortably snap away. I'm always finding myself, composing the picture, thinking about the way it's being represented, and through the years developing my photographic skills, I guess that's something I've almost lost.