I think I should start by saying that my world is architecture first, and really photography second. I was trained as an architect, fully qualified, and worked as an architect for five years, during which period photography sort of crept up on me from behind, and left me in a slightly bewildered state at one stage as to just exactly who am I, and am I a photographer or an architect? The point of saying this is that I belong in the architectural world, and it's a world I love and enjoy. I am not known in the photographic world, and certainly don't know it, and had no professional training as a photographer. I simply learned photography through architecture and through experience. Now to begin with, it may sound faintly academic, and I'm not faintly academic at all. Photography is a contraction of two Greek words, photos, meaning light, and graphos, meaning writing. So photography is literally writing with light. Light is the medium, and you can't do anything without it. The strange thing is that as a student in architecture, I experienced most of the modern masters in photographs, usually black and white, and rapidly became very puzzled that when I started travelling on the continent and in America, why was it that all the buildings were different to what I'd expected? And I began suspecting that architectural photography, a kind of tradition of architectural photography as it was then, was in some curious way not quite conveying the reality of what one went to see.

To use one of my own early photographs as an example to beat myself with, what I found was a kind of abstraction. This is a monastery in Crete, appropriate after the Greek association, and as you can see from the contact print which is printed just above it, it has been selected out of an image in order to increase the sort of abstract power of the light and shade and forms. This is what I call the selective eye. Every photographer is a selective eye. It's worth thinking, by the way, of any photograph you ever see. What's going on around the edges? Because whatever it is, it's something the photographer has decided you're not going to see. And it seemed to me that the selective eye and abstraction were one of the things that architectural photography profoundly suffered from.