It is fair to say that I grew up on the set of The Days of Our Lives. My home and my back yard were in a brand-new suburb called Conifer Grove in South Auckland, New Zealand.

Built on flat, ex-racehorse land and crop farms on an inlet deep in the Manukau Harbour—it was cul-de-sac book ending cul-de-sac, each named after an old racehorse.

Perhaps the most inspiring memory with which I left high school was that of a teacher who opened my eyes to how I could view the world through a camera. This made a lasting impression and I gradually started imagining what it might be like to be a photographer.

My work as a photographer is largely about sitting still and seizing moments: glimpses into and out of subtle gestures, brief encounters. My initial priority, when I am shooting, is how it feels to be somewhere, rather than how it looks: the cool evening spent in front of a warm fire; the smell of old paint peeling from big gestures of concrete forms; the expansion of a full room and the compression of an empty one. 

Our sense of the world is related to where we have come from and the places where we have been. My life stories and experiences are an essential part of my photography equipment, as that, together with the environment in which I find myself, is precisely what informs the unique sense of place I feel when I turn up at a building to photograph it for the first time.