Electricity

I started my working life as a computer programmer. I landed the job entirely by accident, so it's a complete coincidence that my dad was a computer programmer, too.

When I was eight, my family went to live in Hong Kong for three and a half years, while my dad worked on a project for the Standard Chartered bank there. He went to the office Monday to Friday and Saturday mornings and sometimes we'd go down to meet him from work on a Saturday.

Occasionally, he'd take me into the computer room. It was very clean and the air was chilly. The tall cabinets didn't have much to see, just the big pairs of reels turning back and forth.

Later, when I was into electronic music in the late seventies and early eighties, the equipment that the bands used would be a mass of knobs and cables. Watching the musicians control the sounds their machines made looked like some modern day alchemy.

As time has gone on, as we've entered the digital age, the workings of technology have disappeared. Thus, Kraftwerk's live show has changed from this to this.

But the analogue has not completely disappeared from our lives. I took this shot at Lancaster station at dusk. It's a rather Heath Robinson contraption that is part of the electrical infrastructure for the overhead lines on the railway. I like how crude it is, raw almost. It's workings are not impenetrable flows of ones and zeroes but visible to the human eye.