Well, people from the "me" generation use photography to show off what they are doing, to show the world themselves and their friends. Those sort of diarized accounts have always been there. But the phenomena of making those diaries public is new, isn't it?

There's an awful lot of work being done that no one ever sees, or that is only seen in the gallery world. I feel that the public are losing touch with the great stuff that's being done in photography.

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.

My current project was shot on film, and because of that I've spent my entire day removing dust-specks from negatives. You wouldn't have to do that on digital because you don't get dust on the scanner. I say to myself, "Why am I doing this all day?" I could have just bought a digital camera and I wouldn't have to remove dust-specks ever again. But when you move closer to a film image, it has a real truth to it. And I really like that.

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

We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.