As far as I know no one in these pictures has ever seen them, but I think it would be great if they would all show up to the gallery opening and mill around, discovering themselves on a forgotten day, walking down a street now changed, in a city they no longer live in, wearing clothes long ago worn out and discarded.

When I started shooting strangers, I didn't really know what I was up to, but gradually I realized that I was as interested in the buildings behind the people as in the people themselves, and that sometimes the change created by so many different pedestrians walking past a constant place was more interesting than any one individual. In taking portraits, I'd always read, you should pay great attention to the eyes and the hands. But in making these pictures I've realized how much we express ourselves by the way we walk.

At the end of the 1980s I considered the project finished, but I now see it as a lifelong undertaking, and after a gap of over fifteen years have resumed work on Strangers.