‘I’d had too much to smoke and was lying down with my Leica when I saw the Bubbleman. The bubble burst just as I pressed the shutter’
I only have two of my pictures up at home – and this one lives in the bathroom. It was commissioned by The Face and was among the first documentary photographs I had published. In the 1990s, everyone wanted to work for The Face. My first assignment was shooting neo-Nazis in Rome. It only took 15 years of work for me to become an overnight success. After that, I suggested a story on travellers.
It was 1992 and the Tories’ Criminal Justice Bill was due to give police new powers to stop the movement of travellers, taking away some of their rights to authorised sites. Myself and the writer Amy Raphael went off in search of travellers – and ended up at Glastonbury, where this photograph was taken. I’d had too much to smoke and was lying on the ground with my Leica when I saw the Bubbleman – and a naked bloke who came along and started playing with the bubbles. As I pressed the shutter, the bubble burst and I thought: “Shit, I didn’t get it!” But when I saw the contact sheet, there it was, the very last frame – with the material covering his willy.
