I'd have liked to be a modernist but I'm a hundred years too late. The shiny materials of modernism, the glass and steel, have become grubby and no-one believes photography can show us anything new anymore. But then, some kinds of modernism were always a bit too Pol Pot for comfort. As if you could get rid of the traces of the past, and just begin afresh. These are human traces, the signs of wear and tear. Materials carry memories within them and they hold onto them even after the people are gone. Everyone seems to want to get rid of the medium: to have virtual or augmented reality, illusions suspended in mid air, even eventually no screens, and no material support. But then we feel nostalgic too for the signs of materiality: the scratches on a record or a piece of film, the light leaks in a faulty camera. Which is odd because if you listen to a new vinyl record or watch a newly released 35mm film, the first thing that strikes you is how pristine they are, how high resolution they are, how much depth they have. Really, it's not about the analogue and the digital at all but about loving the thingly or hating our bodies. We dream of immateriality, of a spirit world, of telepathy just like the Victorians did, and like them we are also in love with stuff. I like to photograph dirty and scratched windows, especially the train door windows that are pulled up and down at every stop. But if you really want to know what this is all about, it's about what I think photography can be or do these days. If a photograph is going to be a window on the world, it ought to be filthy and fragile. I'm sure there's a Flickr stream of the filthy and fragile, also tagged 'picturesque ruins'. But, being a modernist-come-lately, I don't want to add to that. I'm still hoping for something new, even if it is a new kind of old. Through the glass (the window or the camera lens) we still might glimpse Utopia - though it may turn out to be a car park.

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