The box, yellow with a red logo of 5 letters – Kodak, had lain in a draw, largely ignored since the late 1970s. There were 40 or s0 photographs inside, all exposures made in pursuit of the objectives of my enquiry. These were three: First, to explore light, which is what photography is about after all. Secondly the images would be conceived as small images, to represent the detail. Thirdly, the image would be fully composed in the camera and the whole photograph printed without cropping, imposing a discipline of careful observation, particularly of the image edges.

It was a time of red filters, fat film underexposed and overdeveloped, a rejection of the rules of composition and the avoidance of anything remotely beautiful or pretty. The negative holder on a Lietz was fractionally larger than a 35mm negative, thus allowing the black border which indicated that all the negative had been printed.