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AMc: Even though you worked with a 5x4 camera, which by its very nature slows things down, the pictures are still very much about the “decisive moment”—I get the sense of you waiting for the choreography to come together.

SR: It was very challenging because often there were a lot of people in the frame, and how do you find the decisive moment when there are a hundred people moving around? Sometimes I would just take the picture and not really be too bothered if one person was standing in front of another, or if a lamppost was coming out of somebody’s head. But another reason for using 5x4 was because everyone’s a photographer now—whether with a mobile phone or a high-end DSLR—and I had to ask myself what differentiates me from them? So by using a 5x4 I was actually making a very public statement that I was there to take a photograph of this landscape.

People were quite interested in what I was doing but, more importantly, they didn’t feel threatened. If I’d been on a beach walking around with a 35mm camera I suspect people would have felt a lot more threatened. Funnily enough, I was getting quite spontaneous pictures with a very cumbersome piece of equipment. It would take five or ten minutes to set the camera up, so people would get bored with watching me and end up carrying on with what they were doing. There are only a couple of frames where you can see in the distance that someone’s looking at me, but generally it’s almost as if I wasn’t there.

from an interview with simon roberts