I am fascinated by photography: the attempt to capture a fleeting reality, to freeze action, but most of all to record the experience of a moment that is already drifting towards the vortex of the past. Photographs of people are the most challenging and frustrating. In a good photographic portrait there is the sense that the look, the gesture and the setting all reveal a “real” person. “Yes, you've captured him exactly” I say, as I look at the image of someone I know well. Like a painting, a photograph can convey more than the pixels that make it up. I scan the image for clues to the reality of the person who is now reduced to two dimensions, fixed and mute.

A recent exhibition of photographs from Eastern Europe before the Second World War included images of peasants in rough clothes, faces weathered, hands calloused, thoughtful, suspicious of the camera being pointed their way, proud, solid but also wary, vulnerable. Alongside them, other photographic images were clearly contrived, working with abstract shapes or photomontage. All were making a political point, but it was the peasant images that spoke most eloquently of life in that place and time. Whether taking photographs or looking at them, I make the assumption that each person has some unique essence, a character that may be revealed in – but not entirely defined by – the physical circumstances and appearance that the camera records.