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Well, first off, I'm very lucky, because my biggest passion
is actually being a photographer.
And, it's quite amazing to me
that I'm actually paid to be a photographer.
I'm a very nosy person, and photography is a great excuse
to get me around, and see places and meet people,
go to new countries, find out what's going on.
That whole process is really my great passion.
What I love to do and my work
are so similar, I cannot separate them out.
That's unusual for a photographer.
And then, even to relax,
I buy photography books, you can see I collect them,
you see them behind you, you see them over here,
you can see them on this shelf,
and that's where I sort of indulge myself,
by spending the money that I've earned
by building up this collection of over 12,000 photography books.
As well as that, I do have other normal things in my life,
I like to eat well, I like to go on walks,
I like to go on holidays,
although, I can't really have holidays,
because a holiday for me means you don't work.
And that would be a great shame.
So I even work on my holidays, but less hard than normally.
Often my subject matter is very ordinary.
I'm interested in supermarkets, in the food that people eat,
I'm interested in day-to-day life
as well as trying to photograph things that are extraordinary.
Photographers love to photograph the exotic, the beautiful,
so, my pleasure is to see how interesting ordinary life is,
because it's too easy just to ignore that.
Probably my main subject matter is just day-to-day life.
Often, things like this have been overlooked,
so something as simple as going to a supermarket,
has not been photographed that much.
Maybe more people now have done it, but when I first started,
in the 80's, it was not a topic that people really thought about.
Well, I mean, a photographer
builds up a lifestyle and approach to the world
which, in a sense,
reveals something about their relationship to it.
That's the important thing.
You have a subject matter, which is the world out there,
and then you have you, which is the viewer,
and your relationship to that
is also the subject, which you try and express.
So, it's the connection to the world that you'll try and talk about.
It's very important that it's subjective,
it's very important that it's personal,
and, at the same time, it relates
to the world that's out there, so other people can understand
what your concerns are, and they can perhaps learn
and be entertained by the way you've made that connection.
People understand that photography
is the great democratic art form of the world,
it's something we can all do. Whatever language we speak,
photography language binds us all together.
So, I'm very excited by this expansion of photography,
and it means that the books and the exhibitions
and the Internet presence, get more and more traffic
and more people responding to it.