"These photographs record a primary contact between a naive photographer and an alien world. They were taken when I arrived in the UK as a refugee in the seventies. The intention was just recording the new reality, to try and make sense of it. The camera was an ideal instrument to both provide a window and some form of shield to be able to look. Formally they follow modernist conventions with no attempt at subverting them. They encapsulate a time when British industrial and political power went into decline, showing a connection between a rich past and an uncertain future, just before the installation of the neoliberal order."