Forty years ago, I shot my first roll of Kodachrome 25, and from that moment became immersed in the practice of colour photography. Kodachrome was a remarkable colour transparency film, made from 1936 to 2009, and at the time that Kodak ceased to sell it, I wrote a brief elegy about its history, its qualities and the particular skills and aesthetics that they fostered.

Photography and memory are of course intimately bound together, for good and ill, and since once out of childhood I never kept diaries, my regular—often daily—practice of photography forms the physical prop of my recollections. So, for as long as I am able, I will pursue memory and photography at once, revisiting the photos that I took four decades on, month by month (using the dates Kodak stamped on the slide mounts), and bringing a remembered past and the present into juxtaposition.

This project will, I hope, engage those who are interested in the analogue past of photography, in the workings and frailties of memory, in the manner in which photography forms and deforms memory, and—since my photography was always at least partly documentary—in the past that camera and film recorded. There is much psychological study on the way in which a coherent identity is assembled by the false mapping back of the ideas, attitudes, feelings and temperament of the present personality onto past selves. I know, though currently cannot quite feel, the mental disruptions that brought me to photography in the first place. It is with trepidation, then, that I reopen those old yellow boxes of slides.