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I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

In Australia, there just weren't strong roles for actors of colour. I was often being asked to turn up for commercials with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder. I thought, 'Are we in the '60s?'

I lived and grew up in the black and white period of photojournalism.

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century.

If you take the '70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.

In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson's 'Decisive Moment,' Frank's 'The Americans'... many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I'll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color.