A man came in on Tuesday with a stack of Japanese football magazines from the 80s, and it turned out he'd shot most of the boots inside them.

He took the table by the window and started working through them without saying a word to anybody, turning pages slowly, going back on himself every so often. When we brought the flat white over we had to ask. Nobody puts that cup down and walks away.

25 years photographing football boots out of Tokyo, starting in 1986. Studio work for brands that carried real weight then and that half the players on a pitch today wouldn't be able to name.

A boot on a sweep of paper, a single light moved by hand across an afternoon until the stitching read as stitching and the studs looked like they'd hurt. He described it as the least interesting part of his own job. Precise, repetitive work nobody was ever going to credit him for, done to a standard he held anyway.

What he wanted to talk about was what happened after he handed the film over.

The magazine would land weeks later, sometimes months, and his photograph would be sitting underneath a headline, with a paragraph of writing beneath it explaining what the boot was actually for. Somebody had looked at his picture and then written sentences about it. Somebody else had set those sentences, chosen the weight, decided where the logo would sit and how long it would wait before you noticed it. He started cutting the pages out and keeping them, and by the end he had more of other people's typesetting in his archive than he had of his own photography.

He told us, without any embarrassment about it, that the writing on those pages is his favourite thing in the world. 40 years in and that's where he landed.

His view was about what those pages were up against. You were already holding the magazine for the match report, the paper couldn't hold fine detail, and the ad had maybe one headline to stop you. So the writing had to be good enough to beat the football. He can still open a page from 1991 and read every word of it standing up at a table in a coffee house on the other side of the world.

30 minutes with somebody that far inside a thing does something to you. We've not looked at a football photograph the same way since.

He left two of the magazines with us. They're by the till and nobody's managed to walk past them yet.

Shot of the good stuff.