There was as big a reaction after the revelations about Assad's chemical weapons. Nevertheless, that photograph did strike a singular chord. Which leads us to a larger fact: we don't understand why certain photographs create such an upheaval in one's soul. You look at them and go, "Oh my gosh." And that doesn't happen with television. It's unique to photography. Photographs are unique in that they are a frame abstracted out of reality, out of, in this case, a civil war. A single event can carry so much weight. And that is extraordinary.

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.

Photography was increasingly being seen as something outside the art world. As a sort of illustration. They just fired the director of photography at the Sunday Times Magazine - that's where everyone went with their photo essays in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. It was the place to get published. It is an issue. And I feel it. There's no budget. The budget-holders are very often people who've been to the professional colleges where art is not taught. So art as a part of education is something that's missing - since Thatcher's day, anyway.

We create these walls between fact and fiction, but often the difference between the two is as little as that between a real name and a pseudonym. So I'm not sure about those walls - certainly not in the realm of visual arts.

Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.

What people that are professionals in the art world - both in literature and the other arts - always try to do is to recognize the feasibility of making the transition from the particular to the general - to make the transition from the portrait of one postman - to take Van Gogh, for example, to something that is every postman. That synecdotal transition that most selfies don't make. But we who live in this world, and not simply in our private realities, understand that that's the transition our art has to make.