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While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

It wasn't until I realised that I could actually take nice photographs that I started to become passionate about it. I then got a few jobs working for magazines in London, and I would get terribly excited and intense about doing a job and taking photographs and looking through the lens to capture something amazing.

Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.

I was born in the 1980s, so learning about the late 1960s was really fascinating, not only just because of the way things looked and sounded but because of what was going on in society at that time.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

When I was a teenager, I loved photography and writing.

! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.

It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.'