"By driving fast I reached the end of the fjord minutes before the the ferry was due to leave. There was one articulated lorry waiting. The driver told me that the approaching ferry was not the one we wanted, that our ferry must be running late. He stayed in his cabin while I filmed raindrops in puddles near the slip way. This delay was using up precious time and I realised I was going to have to push pretty hard if I was to make my early evening flight from Stavanger back to London. It was stupid of me not to have got up earlier and caught the previous ferry". Julian Opie, 2005.

Although he is popularly known for his simplified portraits, Opie is an inveterate traveler: his work attests to car trips across Europe. Initially, Julian Opie takes photographs of his subject matter - be it of people, landscapes or still lives - he then digitally manipulates the photographs and constructs his images by a process of elimination and distillation, and through this practice he has developed a concise and reductive formal language, often with an ironic intelligence.