I first became interested in photography really as a boy when I was about 10 or 11 and I sold
my bike and bought a camera and a bomb damaged seal here near the center of the city. I grew
up in a city that was in pretty intense conflict. I came from a mixed marriage family and I think
I felt pretty isolated from both sides and photography was a way of empowering myself and
finding myself in a position where I could be free frankly and be able to see without worrying
about what people would say or it gave me a sense of autonomy. I joined Magnum at a very
young age, Magnum Photos. I was 19 or 20 at the time. I needed to work and I wanted to be
part of an organization. I didn't want to be isolated as a photographer. I made two portfolios
and I sent one to the Belfast Telegraph, the local newspaper trying to get a job and one to Magnum
in New York and I thought, you know, let's just see. Belfast Telegraph never got back to me. But
Magnum New York invited me to London and that was how it started. It was very uneducated in
photography, completely uneducated. The only photographer that I really knew of and obsessively
loved was Walker Evans. I've got a Walker Evans book here that really, really, I'm not exactly
sure why but it just got me. I got it really when I was very young. I was about 18. Where is it?
Oh, here it is. Wow, that was good. If you look at these labor anonymous pictures by Evans,
there's a series here, Labor Anonymous, because they were so un-posed and so it was snapshot
photography, vernacular. And then, of course, I went to London and I couldn't resist. I couldn't
resist. Evans was, I mean, in fact, I encourage it to young students to rip off photographers
they really like when they're starting out. You know, I'm making work out of reality, you know,
from reality but I wouldn't say it's, I wouldn't really say it's purely documentary. It's not
an art I've driven. It's in the guise of documentary, maybe. Mays is, I would say, conceptual
documentary because it's about repetition as a form of control. So it's an idea as well as
being a photographic record in a documentary sense. I spent a year trying to photograph it,
over a hundred days shooting, trying lots of different approaches. And I was in a room on my
own and I opened a cupboard and all these rules of paper fell out and they were the architects'
plans of the prison. And then I realized that, you know, the shapes, the way the blocks are
situated, the way these inertia and starrows are all situated, the way the Tars are positioned,
it's all completely worked out. I mean, it's all done entirely for a reason. The penny dropped.
You have to photograph the system of this place and try to bring the system out. That was how Mays
came to be in understanding it as a system and understanding my role as a photographer in implementing
my own system to the system and bringing one machine to another machine, which then led to the
future projects.
