I began to collect new and used books and illustrated albums about Capri. I became more and more absorbed in pictures, stories and the history of the island. People talk about a mysterious disease called Capromania. Undoubtedly I'm a bad case of it. I first went to Capri in 2001, and have been back every summer since then. And around the same time I had my first premonitions and vague notions of a particular book I wanted to do about Capri. A book with pictures of the island, of the kind I had never seen anywhere. I'd looked everywhere for photographs that show Capri as I feel it, but unfortunately without success. In time, I began to think it was part of the mystery of the island that it could not be photographed. And then – window-shopping in a chilly German street, with my mind on quite a different project and full of enthusiasm for the deserts of the earth – I stumbled by chance on the first pictures I'd seen that conveyed the Capri I had in my mind's eye.

Back in Düsseldorf, I set about tracking down this special photographer. Obviously I had other things to do as well, and anyway his name had been