The studio is smaller than people expect, I imagine.

Always. Everyone who visits says that. They have an idea from the work that there is some large operation behind it. In fact it's a room with a table and a lot of shelving and a very good lamp. The work is slow. That's on purpose.

Intentionally slow?

Yes. I got tired of speed. I worked in a way that valued how much I could produce, and then one year I produced a great deal and liked almost none of it. The slowness is corrective. When you can only make ten things in a year instead of a hundred, you make sure the ten are worth it. Sometimes I make only four or five things I keep. The rest are useful failures. You learn from them, you don't sell them.

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.