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.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Open a magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There's nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then.
My earliest memory is nursing and struggling to see the colored lights making up the map of the world, the famous backdrop for Larry King's TV show. There's an 'I-want-to-do-all-things-at-once' kind of theme to it.
I wanted to make pictures where you would not know who took them. I also bring the present into the past.
They weren't great pictures, but they were fun, and they really represented that period of time well.
Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.
I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today's existence.
History was a hobby for about, oh, 20 years before I got into print.
Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents.
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
It was 1966 by the time I started taking pictures seriously and books, newspapers and magazines of the time were full of great pictures that helped to inspire me.