He Saw That No One Owned Anything

He Was Looking At Her With Amused Suspicion. There Was Something Between Them, And Even She Had To Acknowledge That A Tame Remark About The Weather Sounded Perverse.

London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.

A Twenty-one-year-old Writer Is Likely To Be Inhibited By A Lack Of Usable Experience. Childhood And Adolescence Were Something I Knew.

There Did Not Have To Be A Moral. She Need Only Show Separate Minds, As Alive As Her Own, Struggling With The Idea That Other Minds Were Equally Alive. It Wasn't Only Wickedness And Scheming That Made People Unhappy, It Was Confusion And Misunderstanding, Above All, It Was The Failure To Grasp The Simple Truth That Other People Are As Real As You. And Only In A Story Could You Enter These Different Minds And Show How They Had An Equal Value. That Was The Only Moral A Story Need Have.

It Is Photography Itself That Creates The Illusion Of Innocence. Its Ironies Of Frozen Narrative Lend To Its Subjects An Apparent Unawareness That They Will Change Or Die. It Is The Future They Are Innocent Of. Fifty Years On We Look At Them With The Godly Knowledge Of How They Turne Dout After All - Who They Married, The Date Of Their Death - With No Thought For Who Will One Day Be Holding Photographs Of Us.