Hugh Hamilton

I met Rachel when she was fifteen and dancing in Cats...she went on from dancing to acting and became a TV star in Australia, married a fellow actor and had two beautiful children...this was for my Rosebud project. She's holding a nipple tassel given to her by the great Australian actor Bille Brown, who got it from Sir Ian Mackellen who got it from Jude Law....I think....

I've been in Sydney for the last two weeks, tidying up my life (my mother is selling her house and I needed to sort the storage of a lot of my life out). Yes, I was there for the dust storm. No, I did not photograph it..... More pictures seemed a little superfluous...given everyone in Sydney was frantically photographing it with any and every camera that was at hand.

Since August last year I've been shooting a series I call Rosebud. The title comes from the film Citizen Kane, in which a journalist spends the narrative trying to find the meaning of Kane's last word "rosebud", which turns out to be Kane's childhood sled. All of us have seemingly meaningless objects we are carrying through our lives, objects that mean nothing to anyone else but symbolise a world to us. The person we once were can be found in the objects that person kept. To my friend Zoe it was the tweezers her mother gave her when she was eleven and with which she still plucks her brows to this day. To Steve Martin it was the hat he bought for his first magic act. I have just linked up with local Los Angeles charity Children of the Night to produce a book of this project for their benefit. It seemed appropriate to use people's childhood memories to help teenagers who have had their childhoods taken from them.