“I was 18. I just got off this freighter from Hong Kong.” Time and place: that’s what you need to know. He travelled. He shot a picture. That’s the Girardian mode. He rediscovered this particular slide relatively recently, in a box that had been sitting in someone’s basement or garage for over 20 years. “I wouldn’t make a work like that today,” he says, on the eve of his major exhibition at The Polygon Gallery. “But I look at that now and I think, ah, okay, I used a 200-millimetre lens, a really long lens, to get this compression or flattening effect. That was a good choice, and very slow Kodachrome.” Place, position, technical details. The where and how are their own rewards. Take a step; look around; find your next picture.