In conversation: on light and memory

You have said that you think about light the way other people think about language. Can you say more about that?

Language has grammar — rules that structure meaning. Light has something similar. The direction tells you about time. The quality tells you about weather. The colour tells you about season. When you photograph someone, the light is also a sentence about when and where they are. I'm trying to make that sentence as precise as possible.

When did you start thinking this way?

Late, honestly. I took photographs for fifteen years thinking about composition, about subject, about narrative. The light was just... what was there. Then I had one afternoon in a studio in Barcelona where the skylight was doing something extraordinary — moving as a cloud moved — and I understood that the photograph was about the light, not the subject. Everything I'd shot before that felt slightly wrong, in retrospect.