'I rarely carried a camera in my youth. I didn’t take many trips abroad in my twenties, but when I did, I made it a philosophical point not to capture my experiences anywhere except in my memory, worrying that an obsession with photographing my surroundings would detach me from them. In my thirties, I began to travel extensively for work – across London, the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond. My memory was no longer so reliable, and technology had advanced enough for me to take, store and share as many photos as I liked. I walked round cities for hours, photographing constantly (to the frustration of whoever I was with). By doing so, I worked out what interested me most: architectural and historical landmarks, monuments and memorials, public art, posters and graffiti. I witnessed intense gentrification, in Brighton in my twenties and London in my thirties, so I took numerous pictures of the latter, inspired by Eugène Atget’s work to document ‘Old Paris’. Like Atget, I read extensively about the cities I visited to work out what I wanted to capture, and it turned out that rather than distracting me from it, taking pictures made me much more engaged with my environment.'