Art has always played an important role in Raya's life. When she was young she enjoyed painting and drawing and, before she ever considered becoming a professional photographer, she collected Harcourt postcards. Although she now says that she would have liked to have been an architect - she often draws plans of her future loft - she spent her first wages on a camera (as she didn't have enough money for a video camera!). Having realised that she wasn't going to make a living by taking only artistic photographs, she extended her subject matter to include fashion. "In 1998," she says, "I dropped the small jobs to take up photography full-time.
