When I started photography in the early 1980s, I absorbed everything I could find about photography. I spent a lot of time in the library. There were no photobooks of course, but I read the photography magazines and not least the Time-Life books on photography where I had my first meetings with the great masters. Somewhere in one of these publications there was a photo from a bar in Gallup, NM. It must have been the first grainy and tilted picture I had ever seen, it didn’t look like he had looked through the camera either! I didn’t understand it and I’m not sure if I liked it at that point but was totally fascinated that you could make a picture like that and that photography can take you to places like that. You can really feel the tense and violent atmosphere, and many years later I made it to Gallup myself; it seemed like time had been standing still. I got drunk and got into trouble and actually had to run away with 12 drunk people after me, but that’s another story.