There were no reruns with this, this had to work
Everything was about getting this right
He was very worried about his legacy and the fact that he was able to
in his working practice which was kind of very secretive but he wanted to share that
and he kind of entrusted me with the job of making the pictures
Now I end up with the situation that forever people are going to ask me
about him and about his person and I don’t really know that much about it at all
My photography deals with the outside world
and I guess issues, whether they’re personal or whether they are things that I feel very strongly
about in the world that we live in now
A lot of artists are kind of like they have one thing
and this is what they do and they spend their whole life dealing with this particular issue
and this way of working
and I’m just like I’m interested in everything
and that manifests itself in what is a very erratic way of working, because I’m a sole operator
I’ve never wanted to be one of these people who has a whole kind of factory type situation
I’m very much about doing what I can do in a day
This book that’s just been published in Japan
Made Glorious Summer
is a book that recycles and deals with a lot of the ephemera and things that I kept over the years
and I put the book together as a kind of...
– I don’t know – a kind of loss of innocence
a kind of moment of my youth really
It’s kind of great
That’s outside South Africa House
So I was a precocious little kid with a camera
going to gigs and going on political marches and spending time in the school dark room
One of my school books - I kept so much junk - I knew it would come in handy one day
You know, all artists have storage problems but I try and keep as much stuff as I can
I realised it was getting a bit crazy the other day when I was looking through my boxes
and I found my plastic bag collection and I thought, why the fuck am I collecting plastic bags
If you make art, you know, you want to keep everything
so you just have this never ending problem with storage
Lee was really kind of interested in my first photo book
the Living Room book
so he liked my pictures and the way that I take pictures
and he liked the way that I worked
He was very, very insistent that it was this particular season and this collection
The Horn of Plenty
as this was his kind of retrospective season
so for someone to come along and say I want you to photograph this for me
was an unusual thing for me because...
I’m only ever really generating my own projects about issues and concerns that I have myself
Often when you’re making art, you’re spending hours, weeks, days, preparing for that moment of creation
that can sometimes be a second or a minute or five minutes
and what I saw with Lee
was he would have these moments when everything would be prepared
and his staff around him would get everything ready
and the model would be there and they would be there
and there would be the girl with the pins and the woman who would hand him the scissors
and then they’re bring in the rolls of cloth and then he’d be like [cutting sound]
you know, like cutting and then pinning onto the girl
and then he’d be like, oh, and sit down again
and they’d all look at what he did in like two or three minutes
and those were the moments that I was trying to capture in the photographs
This box that’s broken. I need to get another one now
When I finished taking the McQueen pictures
as Lee didn’t know how to work InDesign
I decided to go back in time a bit and make a maquette-cum-scrapbook
He made the final edit so you could see the garments being produced
from the drawing stage through to the show
This is for me is him
I was like, that’s you
He quite liked that so that went near the front of the book
I went to the landfill sites out on the A12...
also in East London
I think it was important that they were in East London
and I made these very theoretical pictures of the waste ground on ten-eight
These are used throughout the book for a whole myriad of different reasons
and I don’t think the book would be the same without it
it's in many ways what turns what could be a fashion-cum-documentary book
into what then is a sequence of pictures which is a work of art of its own
There's this one which I haven’t seen
That’s digital; that’s why you haven’t found it. That’s taken with a digital camera
You are funny
Oh, it’s good to see this big
wow
Yes, these two, wow, look at that
This is, yes, possibly my favourite one
Is this one okay?
Yes, that’s fantastic
and then seeing them like this
it’s amazing
When you’re working with this old analogue camera, that they have eight shots on the roll
I can shoot the eight shots in a matter of seconds so just constantly I’m running around
I’m looking for shots and moments
I’m constantly changing the cameras on this kind of constant cycle
and one of the assistants was like
"you must be careful, it’s very dangerous"
and I’m there thinking, well I’ve been to a few war zones
this is a fashion show
I feel that I’m kind of looking after part of his legacy now with this work
and that’s something that I never imagined would happen
which is a very strange situation for me to be in
It’s such a shame that he’s not there to see it
but, at this point it’s four years since he died, it’ll be nearly five years...
it’s a time to celebrate him, not to be sad any more