I had made editorial portraits, fashion images and record sleeves for a while and there was always this fast turnover; making small bodies of work in a week to a month start to finish, then publication, job done, onto the next one. It all got to be a bit of a blur. Encouraged by Anna Fox, I started teaching at Farnham in 98 and met the inspirational Keith Arnatt. At one of his lectures he showed ‘Evidence’ by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, so taken with it was I that he lent me his copy - it’s now my favourite photography book. Teaching was, and is, a terrific foil to my practise, helping me figure out where I was with photography and where I could go.

In June 2000, on a rather strange stag weekend in Budapest, I visited the House of Photography’s library and had a second revelation in the form of ‘Der Mensch Mein Bruder’ by Helmar Lerski. Another defining moment, something about the conceptual purity and ambiguity of his ‘Transformation in Light’ series merged with the anachronistic feel of Budapest coupled with a breakaway train ride to Vienna and I was off on the beginnings of the New Scent. I had just bought a Fuji 6x9 rangefinder camera and had brought it away on the trip to try out with some Ilford Delta 100. These and a Sekonic Flashmate meter became the constant production equipment of the project. No tripod, occasional Metz Mecablitz and I tried to take only one shot of each subject. I stopped taking pictures for the project in July 2003. During that time I courted editorial trips to distant locations yearning for that first-time-in-a-new-town head space that helped facilitate the kind of pictures I wanted to make. I was very lucky to get a round the world commission from Shiseido to make the ‘Beauty where you find it’ project, which this piggybacked off of.

The photographs had to have an out of contextness and a sense of an indistinct visual imperative. I started printing stuff up and figuring out what worked and what didn’t. It took me about 2 years to decide on an edit, at one point it was 76 shots long, most of that time it was under the bed as I needed to get distance from the images in order to be able to arrange them in a formal edit. I finished the edit in June 2005.