Bryan Adams: A passion for pictures

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I've been interested in photography for a long time – it's been quite a journey. I remember I was about to embark on my first tour and thought to myself: "I've got to get a camera to record this." Prior to that, I'd just used my parents' "snap" cameras, but I got a Canon and documented as much of what I was doing as I could over many years. When I was putting together the re-release of my 1984 album Reckless, I went back into my archives and pulled out all the photographs I'd shot from those sessions. It gave a different perspective on the making of the music.

At the time, it never dawned on me that photography could be a career or that I could do it for anything besides the love and the comedy of it. Some of the on-the-road photographs are too silly to publish – like the shots of my band and me running around naked doing stupid things. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that I started to take things more seriously and began taking self-portraits to include in my own CDs.

Around the same time, I'd done some photographs that were published in the Canadian fashion magazine Flare and that led to my shooting a story for Marie Claire UK. I'm so grateful to them – they gave me my first assignments. Since this was before the advent of digital, the turning point was learning to get my negatives printed properly. I was fortunate to be introduced to two printers in London: Mike Spry, who did all my black-and-white work, and Brian Dowling, who printed all my colour work. Every time my photos came back from the lab, it was like Christmas: I'd open up the box and see what kind of magical transformation these guys had made to my dodgy negatives. It was during those moments I realised photography was much more than just going "click".

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I love 1960s photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. In fact, after my first assignment for British Vogue, I phoned up Mr Penn's office in New York to see if he would sign one of his books that I'd collected. His PA said, "Tell you what: come to us at around 2:30pm, when he's finished his lunch, and you can ask him in person." So I went and met him and he very kindly signed my book for me, then gave me a quick tour of his studio. It was unforgettable.

I consider myself mainly a portrait photographer; however, my latest book, Untitled, is something of a departure from that. I wanted to create something more abstract. It's simply black-and-white pictures captured on the island of Mustique. I came across a beach with lots of black rocks on it, which were exuding this black sand that then mixed with the white sand as the waves came in. The images looked as though they could have been aerial photos of the Earth, or perhaps photos of the Moon or the stars. And so my photography journey continues.

BRYAN ADAMS is a Canadian singer, songwriter and photographer. His latest book of photography, Bryan Adams: Untitled, is published by Steidl; bryanadamsphotography.com; steidl.de