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“I came across this girl in the Oxford University parks, lying in the summer sun reading a book. It was in the late-60s, not a laptop in sight. It was surprising to find an unshaven armpit, almost as shocking as pubic hair. It’s from The Oxford Pictures, my first photographic essay. It was very much a young man’s vision: anxiety, desire and sexual guilt run right through it, maybe because of my strict upbringing with Sunday school lessons and Christian teaching. It might have been the swinging 60s, with lots of photos in the papers of girls in miniskirts and Mick Jagger in a white dress, but plenty of people felt they were missing out – that this sexual revolution was somewhere else, out of reach. We felt the barriers rather than the freedoms. So I looked for visual moments that reflected my sense of being an outsider: isolated figures beside the river, or sitting on a park bench”. (Photo by Paddy Summerfield)
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