1996, from my preface to Paris-London
Feeling foreign never prevented me from loving and photographing London (indeed, I wouldn’t dream of photographing places or people I am not attracted to one way or another). I was delighted by the old ladies who came and sat beside me on the bus and, without knowing me or looking me in the eye, struck up the ritual conversation: ‘Lovely wheather, isn’t it?’ (or conversely, depending on the island’s meteorological caprices: ‘Isn’t it an awful day?’) I loved to watch couples brazenly kissing on the grass of St. James’s Park; or working-class mothers on their doorsteps in Lambeth shouting encouragements to their little boys fighting a boxing match; or a young city clerk on the tombs of an urban cemetery, taking advantage of his lunch hour to expose his pink torso to the sun; I even used to get carried away in cinemas by the moment before the film when all the spectators stood up and sang with one voice: ‘God save our gracious Queen’. I would stand up with them and, though I always felt embarrassed, I couldn’t help thinking that, twelve years earlier, this was the spirit that had kept Londoner’s morale under the bombs.
1955, London, Lambeth, boxing boys (c)