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I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

I've never returned to the locations. I do remember certain days more clearly than others and certain locations with a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps one day, I'll bring my daughter to see them, if she's interested.

A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.

I'm interested in aesthetics, in the way things look, in finding something in an image that maybe people haven't seen.

I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.

I always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material - but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I'm working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.