I always wanted to be a photographer. While I was at school, I got a lab-monkey holiday job in the darkrooms at the 'Independent.' What they taught me there was: you need to get the whole story in one frame.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My father taught me photography. It was his hobby, and we had a small darkroom in the fruit cellar of our basement. It was the kind of makeshift darkroom that was only dark at night.
I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.
I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living.
I've been a photographer all these years... I haven't been in my own darkroom for 10 years.
I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.
I liked the idea of being a photographer, just that you take this one picture of this one thing that'll never happen again - it's a bit weird when you think about it.
I came up, I suppose, a fairly traditional way. I went to art college. I always wanted to be a stills photographer, really, when I was younger, and I briefly worked as a stills photographer.
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.
I realized I didn't want to be a photographer. I gave it up, but I still worked that job in the restaurant and I found myself constantly hanging out in the kitchen.
I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.