• I think you said it very concisely— unless you thought to notice them. It matches something that you have in mind, maybe not necessarily in words, but a feeling— a suspicion, an inkling, something that’s there already that you kind of get to be alert to when you’re a photographer because you’re thinking about what makes a picture. In the early days, I just wanted to travel. And everything about travel is wrapped in this kind of unfulfilled desire to be out in the world moving around, and anything that was connected to that was a part of that for me. Maybe it was a young romanticized thing, but you do things in your own way and try to make it your own no matter what you were influenced by. The idea of travel, of escape, the freedom, the in-between-ness of it, is something that always appealed to me.
  

• Because the United States is such a powerful magnet, and such a final destination for so many people who aren't from there, who try to go there, whether that is to live, to work, or just to visit. It's sort of the ultimate destination in our world. For me, it was more transient than an ultimate destination, and I think that was interesting to consider as a point of transit rather than a final destination. 
  

• It’s funny because that was one of the early stories that I did when I first started making a living as a photographer. I got hired by this magazine called Asiaweek, which is long gone now. I was basically their only photographer and in a way I was sort of an editor as well. I got to dream up stories and go and do them, so it was one of the early things I wanted to do. I lived in Japan earlier, and had never been there working as a photographer. I made pictures there as a young photographer, and this was my first chance to do it as a formal photographer, so I flew out from Hong Kong to do them. I was a broke, young English teacher with absolutely no credentials to be teaching anything back when I was living in Tokyo, so this was a nice departure. 
  
  I was staying in a good hotel, and had the where with alls with the backing of a magazine to do what I needed to do with the story. And it was so great to have the resources of the local correspondent, to get in touch with people and organize this story, and get introductions, and do it. Probably the biggest thing about formal documentary work or journalism is knocking on doors and introducing yourself and explaining to people what you do.
  

• To be honest, I probably developed more of a relationship before I started working professionally, in the sense that if you are not doing it professionally, it really is just you. There’s no magazine behind you, there’s no reason for it, it’s not going to be published— there’s no reason for it other than that you’re doing it for yourself. And so in that case, you really need trust. When you have a magazine behind you, there's a certain advantage behind you, an institution that legitimizes your inquiry. You might be carrying a letter of introduction, and there's all kinds of props that you can use to get into people’s lives. But when it's just you, you have no other way. 
  
  The picture is the goal, not to get close to somebody. But I think that as a young person, when you get started and it’s just you, establishing relationships is a really important first step. And you consider that a lot more when you are just doing it by yourself. 
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• I think early on I had this feeling that the way to photograph a place is so that it is interesting to the people who live there, so they can react to it like, “I've never seen a picture of this before, or done this way,” whatever it might be. In our lives, like you said, we tend to walk past these things, everyday things in our lives that are the world we live in and sometimes, an outsider has the advantage of seeing it all fresh and showing it to you, so maybe I got to do that. I was a newcomer.
  
  Photography itself was a rare enough thing that there weren't enough pictures of a place. That was kind of the function of the place photography used to be, in the sense that there was a minimal amount of technical knowhow and it was expensive to buy film and process it. A certain amount of time has to be devoted to it to get to the level of the craft that is producing things that are looking good. And it's all quite different today. Yet we still go to make the same kind of pictures— of yourself, our friends, the go-to sites. I don't think it takes anything new to see a place afresh, it takes your eyes and your mind, not your equipment — that's the cliche but it's still true today.
  
  
  
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• I was there from ‘87 to ‘90. The place was torn down in ‘92, and the last two years, as it emptied out and became kind of a demolition site, and life was already kind of gone from it. I knew it as this vibrant living thing, and I wasn't attracted to the ruin of it as some people might, who if they had just came across it as a ruin would have found it fascinating and interesting in that way. But I was really devoted to showing it as a living breathing thing.
  

•     Probably the big pivot point between KWC and Hong Kong itself really came when the government announced that the place was going to be demolished. The Walled City was an anomaly, technically a piece of mainland Chinese territory near Kowloon by the airport. That means that Beijing has ultimate say about it. I remember seeing that announcement, and it alerted both Hong Kong and Walled City residents that the days in the KWC were numbered. And it's going to vanish. What that meant for me was that suddenly people who were living in the city had this new framework to understand what someone like me was doing— the place was going to disappear so he’s here taking photographs of it. 
  
  Before the announcement, there was still some hostility towards a foreigner with a camera wandering around. The way that I [overcame] that reluctance and hostility, was that I was using a lot of equipment, like lights, so it was a big production to be photographing. I just started working for magazines, so I was doing portraits for Fortune or for celebrities, as well as [covering] civil wars, coups, and natural disasters. I applied this elevated way of portraiture of good lighting systems to make people and their spaces look good, rather than to do it in black and white and make everything look dodgy and more grim than it actually was. 
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•  That was one of the fundamental things that my colleague Ian and I were trying to do. We didn't know each other until we were both introduced through being interested in KWC. The first thing I understood about the place after getting over the physical, psychedelic fantasy of the physical structure, was that it was just a normal place where people were trying to live lives and raise families. It's not like it's a huge enlightenment to say that, but it ran counter to what everyone was saying about the place. The only information about the place was that it was dangerous, full of the vices of society, the drugs, prostitution, gambling; it was the old fashioned moral judgment about a bad neighbourhood. The reputation continues even after the reality was changed. And all those things were true about KWC, but when I started photographing there in the 80’s, it was just people trying to live their lives. Seeing that and understanding that was so different from everything we’ve heard about the place. 
  
  You could try to make the place worse than it was by continuing to focus on its history and making it look like this horrible den of iniquity, in which some journalists and documentary filmmakers continued to do into the 80’s, really astonishingly. They refused to believe what was in front of their eyes and tried to cram this place into the outdated notion of the Walled City. It was full of families and people trying to make a living in really grim conditions.
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• I wouldn’t say historian because I had no interest in my pictures being made for some sort of historical record. I always made the pictures of now, for now. And I never, especially when I was young, considered, “Oh this would be interesting in 20 or 30 years.” That was absolutely the last thing on my mind. But it's interesting to say novelist, because that probably comes close to what matches, a novelistic impulse to photograph the world, but it's not exactly reality. It's fictionalized through the lens of you. And that’s very different from the journalistic impulse to show the audience what is happening. 
  
  I certainly wanted to share the work, but I did not know how to do that, especially pre-internet. How would you get anything out there? I think it's a really good choice to call it a novelistic impulse. And indeed, I was reading a lot of novels at the time that kind of felt closer to what I was doing and what I wanted to do, that the pictures that were out there at the time that you would come across. It was a much smaller environment to be looking at images, and very few places to look at Photography with a capital P.

• I think it's a part of life now, inescapable for everybody. I'm a little bit of a late joiner for social media, but some years ago, rather than posting phone pictures, I started posting my scanned photographs. And I started with what was my ‘real work,’ rather than personal work (except the old ones). I did it as a way to find out about Instagram, and show my early work. And it's snowballed, so it's a part of my day or my week, to post about the things that I’m photographing or things that I’ve scanned in my archives. It’s an ongoing meandering of my pictures.

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