Pictures from No Man's Land – St Margaret's School for Girls, Edinburgh 1984 was my first extended body of work. It resulted from a six-month artist-in-residence programme initiated by St Margaret's in collaboration with the Scottish Arts Council. Attached to the school's art department, my brief was to teach the senior pupils photography and to produce my own work in the school on a daily basis.

It's difficult to overstate my inexperience as a photographer at the time. In some ways that may even have worked to my advantage; I chose to undertake a project whose scale I would have found overwhelming even after years of practice. Using totally unfamiliar equipment – square format cameras / studio flash – part of my intention from an early stage was to somehow portray the way children become adolescents with the attendant shift from openness to self-consciousness. Consequently, Pictures from No Man's Land is not intended as a documentary project about a private girls’ school as such; the subjects happen to be girls in what happens to be a girls’ school. Rather, I sought to allude to something more universal as regards the process of growing up.