There was like no reruns with this
And 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
that he wanted to share that
and he kind of entrusted me with the job of making the pictures
Now I kind of end up with this situation
that forever, people are going to ask me about him, and about his person
I don't really know that much about it at all
My photography kind of deals with the outside world
and I guess issues whether they're personal
or whether they're kind of 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 kind of very erratic way of working
because I'm kind of a sole operator
I've never wanted to be one of these people
who kind of 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 kind of ephemeral things that I kept over the years
and I've 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 was kind of great
That's outside South Africa House
So I was a precocious little kid with a camera
kind of going to gigs and going on political marches
and spending time in the school darkroom
One of my schoolbooks
So 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, you know, keep as much
as much stuff as I can
I realized it was getting a bit crazy the other day
when I was looking through my boxes
and I found my plastic bag collection
I thought, "Why the fuck am I collecting plastic bags?"
If you make art, 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 kind of generating my own projects
about issues and concerns that I have myself
Often, when you're making art
you are 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
where everything would be prepared
and his staff around him would kind of 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'd hand him the scissors
and then they'd bring him the rolls of cloth, and then he'd be like
like cutting, and then pinning onto the girl, and then he'd be like
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 kind of capture in the photographs
This box is broken
I need to get another one, really
When I finished taking the McQueen pictures
as Lee didn't know how to work [InDesign]
I decided to kind of go back in time a bit
and make a maquette-cum-scrapbook
He made the final edit, so you can see the garments being produced
from the drawing stage through to the show
This is for me, this 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 A-12, also in East London
I think it was important that they were in East London
and I made these kind of very theoretical pictures
of the waste ground on [10-8]
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 kind of 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
Okay, there's this one which I haven't found
Oh, 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
Yeah, these two... Wow, look at that!
This is, yeah, kind of possibly my favorite one
So then the... This one, okay?
Yeah, that's fantastic
And then seeing them right there
so it's a kind of
It's amazing
When you're working with this kind of old, analog cameras
that they have eight shots on the roll
I can shoot the eight shots in a matter of seconds
so there's just constantly... I'm running around
I'm looking for shots and moments
and 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 remember 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 kind of 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 will be nearly five years
it's a time to kind of celebrate him not be sad anymore