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Written on the back of this work is: “With a group commission from The Department de La Somme, and two borrowed medium format Plaubel cameras from a fellow Magnum member, Chris Steele-Perkins, I went to Amiens with great trepidation. I found myself in a French city that I had never ever heard of, other than that it played a significant role in the First World War. I found a place where precisely nothing was going on. I had been working reasonably successfully covering news in over sixty countries as a photojournalist, but I felt something was missing: While my pictures were good enough for the market and the magazines I was working for, they were not good enough for 'me.' I felt the work I was doing was rather flat, characterless and generic. I was getting to understand how light worked, but I felt there was a lack of subtlety in the images, as they were either black or white, but with few tones in between. In the larger negative format, it was a revelation that I could now resolve the gentler in-between tones and I was really excited about the results. From the seed of this lack of action, I realised that what I needed to do was to simply look, and try to remove from the equation the plans, the storyline, the juxtapositions, that had become the standard toolbox of the photojournalist. Deep down I knew instinctively that 'authorship' and a unique style could sustain me through a whole career, and I felt I had finally found the way forward that might stay with me for life. All the fear of explaining, and expecting things to happen, were replaced with the excitement of simply looking and discovering. The smallest things became the largest. I no longer needed events to make work I was happy with; I could make photographs literally anywhere. Freed from this anxiety, I found I could create something out of nothing, and so I took it 'on the road' and applied the same approach to all the work I have done ever since. Thank you, Amiens!” — Peter Marlow