“I was always amazed at how beautiful the light was. At different times of the day the landscape becomes a different place. Dawn and dusk, it’s a different place.”

Adolescence is interesting. I mean, all of life is interesting and all of life is transitionary. But I think there is an exponential growth physically, intellectually, emotionally and there is so much potential.

There’s something about the processional nature of the architecture, of the rooms connecting rooms. It’s just breathtaking.

On practical level I can’t pick up the camera until I think I know what I want. I don’t wander around. It’s almost impossible for me to pick up a camera… it’s really hard.

Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white. We’re always subject to what I call the compression industry, which is an attempt to compress a million shades of grey with a little bit of black and white to just a hundred, or to ten, or to one!

I have always found the suburbs very beautiful – the light, the change of seasons and so on. I am not so interested in the political dimensions of these things.

It was the dreamscape of the suburbs that interested me.

In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.

All of those a requickly made decisions. The fact that you can see the images right away in a funny way makes the whole relationship more casual. I don’t want a casual relationship with my subject.

I didn’t have any witticisms to land on suburbia. I was really just interested in how beautiful it was. I felt it was like a dreamscape and once I understood that was how I needed to approach it the dream started to expand in unusual ways.

I could be standing in the supermarket, and there is a person standing down the aisle, who is reading the back of a cornflakes box but everything about them is going “It’s me! I’m the one you want! I am the necessary subject. This is it!”

It’s a profoundly different thing to be able to refer to the images you are taking at the time and check them out on a laptop that is plugged into your Hasselblad and go “oh no, do it again, do it again”.

When you go to a great concert something that happens is there is a deep sense of communality and connectedness one to another – as though we are all looking to eachother and saying yeah, we get it, we’re all on one page.

As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I’m convinced it’s not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It’s a bit like young girls and horses.

Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white.

On the shining yards of heaven See a wider dawn unfurled. . . . The eternal slaves of beauty Are the masters of the world.

Little by little deep inside us, the diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are.

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

What started as a whisper Slowly turned into a scream Searching for an answer Where the question is unseen I don’t know where you came from And I don’t know where you’ve gone Old friends become old strangers Between the darkness and the dawn

Why is it that the finish line always tends to appear just after the point at which we most want to give up? is it the universe’s way of reserving the best for those who can give the most? What I do know, from nature, is that the dawn only appears after the darkest hour.

The single sculler, alone on the river at dawn, or spotlighted in his lane during a race, is th emost romantic, the most quixotic figure in all rowing.

Dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision.