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. 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.

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!

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

It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.

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.

When you shoot on film, you don't know whether you've got it or not until you get the film processed, and so it changes the relationship we have with the subject whether it's a landscape or a person in a so-called controlled environment in a chair in a studio in front of you.

What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.