People Die, But Money Never Does.

I Have Long Been Interested In Landscape History, And When Younger And More Robust I Used To Do Much Tramping Of The English Landscape In Search Of Ancient Field Systems, Drove Roads, Indications Of Prehistoric Settlement. Towns And Cities, Too, Which Always Retain The Ghost Of Their Earlier Incarnations Beneath Today's Concrete And Glass.

I'm Not A Historian But I Can Get Interested - Obsessively Interested - With Any Aspect Of The Past, Whether It's Palaeontology Or Archaeology Or The Very Recent Past.

It Seems To Me That Everything That Happens To Us Is A Disconcerting Mix Of Choice And Contingency.

The Place Didn't Look The Same But It Felt The Same; Sensations Clutched And Transformed Me. I Stood Outside Some Concrete And Plate-glass Tower-block, Picked A Handful Of Eucalyptus Leaves From A Branch, Crushed Them In My Hand, Smelt, And Tears Came To My Eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, On A Pavement Awash With Packaged American Matrons, Crying Not In Grief But In Wonder That Nothing Is Ever Lost, That Everything Can Be Retrieved, That A Lifetime Is Not Linear But Instant. That, Inside The Head, Everything Happens At Once.

The Photograph Is Concerned With The Power That The Past Has To Interfere With The Present: The Time Bomb In The Cupboard.