I am back in London for one week this July, the 21st through the 27th, and the studio at Bleeding Heart Yard will be open for the duration.

There is a particular pleasure in photographing in London that I never quite shake. The light here behaves differently — softer, more conspiratorial, forever threatening rain. It suits the way I work. I have spent the better part of my career chasing the kind of light the Old Masters understood instinctively: a single source, a deep and forgiving shadow, a face emerging from near-darkness as though it had decided, of its own accord, to be seen. Caravaggio knew the trick of it. So did Rembrandt. The shadow is not the absence of the subject; it is the thing that gives the subject weight.