After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.

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.