I bought my first camera – a 35 mm Retinamat – at the age of 17, because a friend told me that it helped getting acquainted with girls. In fact it didn’t, but it helped me to learn about composition. As I didn’t own an enlarger and couldn’t afford commercial prints, I tried to improve my shots by cropping them with scissors, so as to cut off whatever seemed unnecessary to what I intended to show. In the end, my contact prints ended up looking very much like the postage stamps of my boyhood collection, which I had sold in order to purchase that camera.