As I approach the end of my Syrian retrospective, it’s time to turn the camera around. With all of the previous photos I’ve stuck my camera in the faces of Syrians and urged them to look this way or that. Now the tables have turned and I become the photographed while they become the photographers.

I always travelled with at least three cameras – initially two Nikon F3s and a Polaroid. I used one of the F3s as a backup or I would put in print film for personal photos. On one trip to a village I had a group of children following me and showing keen interest in my equipment and techniques. So I loaded up the spare F3 with a roll of negative film and said ‘Here, have some fun’.

An F3 is a bit of a beast to handle and has none of the modern point and shoot functions so the kids struggled and I think it was probably the first time they had ever looked through a camera’s viewfinder. But they lined up their friends for shots and shifted their models to the left or right or up or down just as I had done to them.

I had totally forgotten about the roll of film they shot that day because a few months later I returned to the village and gave them the processed prints and didn’t keep a set for myself. Twenty years later I discovered the negatives in my files. It’s a hilarious and happy set of images of children in shadows without heads and out of focus. But they did manage to get me to pose and direct me as I directed them.