‘Huge parts of the city were being destroyed. This was part of my attempt to preserve the whole damn thing. The area became a juvenile prison’

I landed in America in 1965 from Chile. I literally arrived on a banana boat. I went to the University of Notre Dame in the midwest and then to Columbia in New York. I had a teacher – also a photographer – who taught foreign students to write and speak better English. I would try to write poetry, which he thought was terrible. I’d never taken a picture before but he encouraged me to try photography and offered to lend me the money for a Pentax Spotmatic he’d seen for sale downtown. After that, I would just walk around New York with it and take photos. It quickly became clear to me how divided the city was. Half was white and the other half was Black and Latino. There was tremendous segregation.

Columbia was very prosperous. The students were well off and many were the sons of extremely rich people. I felt out of place. Also, there’s just a huge sense of loss when you leave your country and you don’t know anybody and are on your own. It made me want to look at what else was going on: to see the other side and the underside of the city. I found it easily because, in the late 60s and early 70s, deindustrialisation was going on. Big companies and car plants were shutting down and there were huge job losses and store closures. That contrast resonated with me. My family had lost a lot of money. The first part of my life was about seeing things disappear and having to make do with less and less. I was interested to see that in the US.