Right after returning from Namibia, I went straight into photographing Ade Bakare’s campaign. I was still under the spell of the red desert in Sossusvlei and wanted to bring some of that landscape into the work. We photographed the strikingly beautiful Ololade in a London studio against a plain white backdrop.

Later, I stripped the desert images down to black and white, then pushed them back into a vivid, almost surreal red through a mix of processes. Placing Ololade in that world just clicked—her presence had such strength that she seemed to belong there naturally. Suddenly they felt dreamlike, almost unreal. It reminded me of something from my past: when I first arrived in London in 1985, I saw a Citroën advert with Grace Jones. It was surreal, unforgettable, and a little outrageous. Dreams come from that same place—half fashion, half hallucination.

Artists inspire me constantly—past and present, across every discipline. With photography, when I see an image I admire, I often try to unravel how it was made—sometimes even recreating it just to understand the process. But inspiration can also appear in the strangest places. Often it comes when I’m confronted with something extreme: grotesque, absurdly funny, or beautifully sober. Those moments shift how I see the world. In the end, inspiration isn’t just influence—it’s transformation. You take what moves you, let it pass through your own life, and hope it emerges in your own voice.

I think style reveals itself over time. After years of photographing, I began to notice certain elements that kept coming back—things I was drawn to without even realising it. Still, I’ve never sat down and declared, “This is my style.”

In fact, sometimes I suspect my style is inconsistency. I like moving from one extreme to the other. If there’s a thread, it’s the unconscious one—the recurring elements that quietly return in my work and in my life.

I started as a photojournalist, later moving into fashion, portraiture, and fine art. To me, shifting between them feels natural—I’ve never been able to sit still.

At the heart of it is curiosity. I often think of it like being in an art class as a child: you’re shown all the tools for the first time, and you want to try them all. That sense of play and experimentation has stayed with me. So moving between genres doesn’t feel like a change of direction, but part of the same exploration.

On the surface, the jobs can feel very different. Journalism often deals with urgency and reality, while fashion or fine art allows for more invention and control. But when I look closely, I find common threads running through them.

For example, while working as a photojournalist during the Kosovo War in 1999, I noticed that some of my portraits carried traces of fashion photography—maybe in the way I approached and framed people with certain lenses, or the angles I sought during quieter moments of the war. It was strange, because the context was so dramatic, and yet those instincts came through unconsciously.

That taught me that the boundaries between genres are more porous than they appear. In the end, whether it’s war or fashion, I’m searching for the same thing: presence—the truth of how someone inhabits space in a given moment.

Some projects make me feel I’m already living it. When it happens it makes me enormously happy. But what excites me most is the unknown—the possibility that tomorrow I might meet a subject I could never have imagined, and that encounter could change the direction of my work. In that sense, the dream subject is always ahead of me, waiting to be discovered.

I spend a lot of time in post-production, exploring endless possibilities until I find the one that feels right. It can take weeks at the computer—but far from a pain, for me it’s pure pleasure. There’s something magical about watching a photograph come alive through endless possibilities.

For Dream, the Namibian desert demanded the use of red. Because the series is about an oneiric state, I pushed that red to its limits.

In other projects, the palette varies: I often gravitate toward bright colours, but I also enjoy reducing or desaturating when it feels necessary. Each image dictates its own voice.

At the moment I’m working on a series of still lifes with art director David Tortora, with whom I often collaborate. It’s a homage to Max Ernst—an attempt to translate his surrealist wild forests and landscapes into photography.