One thing the three projects have in common, is that their point of departure is a strong personal emotion. New York is a city where I have lived some very happy moments, as well as some very unhappy ones. Hence "Up and Down", which of course also refers to "uptown and "downtown", as well as to the rush up and down stairs and elevators, which is part of everyday life, and to the drastic shifts in temperature, which are so disconcerting to a European. Speaking of temperature, I soon found out that the best time for obtaining the kind of photographs I wanted, was during the hottest days in July and the coldest in January: not so much on account of the sweat or the frost I could get into the images, but because of the influence of these extremes on my own moods.

The other common point is colour photography. Many people consider black-and-white as more "artistic" than colour, and they may be right in some respects. To me, who have started as a black-and-white photographer, colour has always seemed more difficult to handle - and this is precisely why I chose it as the medium of my personal projects. In previous instances it had happened that a photograph, which I had taken great pains to shoot in colour, had for some reason been reproduced in black-and-white - and that to my great annoyance I had to admit that it looked better that way. So when photographing New York, I kept telling myself that the one thing to avoid (photography being "the art of not pressing the button") was to take colour photographs that may look better in black and white...

On a physical level, the New York project caused me some very intense ups and downs: I was suffering at the time from severe eyesight troubles, that not only were an obvious hindrance in my profession, but that made me feel particularly helpless in the streets of New York, where even a good pair of eyes can hardly sort out all the things that happen all around and all the time. On certain days I could only see things as through a mist. But the interesting side of this handicap (and the only reason why I mention it) is that in some cases it seemed to help me in the composition of colour, a little as when one attempts to get a better overall vision of something, by observing it through half closed eyelids.