The US remains an object of fascination for me, and the subject of much study, but while many of my friends etc. are American and I have no plans at present to move elsewhere, I consider myself a permanent outsider.

Neoliberalism seems to ramp up every day, making it ever more difficult for anyone but corporations to own and run things and define the flavor of a place. I'd love to be optimistic about the future, but it's not easy.

When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.

Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed

New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied and unburied, to invade the precincts of supposed progress, to lay chill hands on the heedless present, which does not know how to identify the forces that tug at its rationality.

I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.

I try to take pictures on their own terms, considering the historical and social context from which they emerge.