“While working on the streets of New York with the Leica I began to see that the slowness of color film and therefore the depth of space it rendered, was forcing me to slow down and make photographs from further back than I had before. This slight adjustment of space and time produced a new kind of image for me, one that emptied the center of the frame of its nominal subject, “the hook” that I had previously built my photographs on, and instead opened the frame to multiple, more fragmentary, simultaneous events. This gave me a new sense of the street as a place where everything was important; the buildings near and far; the movement of people; the basic street furnishings of light poles, phone booths, hydrants, trees, signs, store windows, all of it cohering in a way that broke open the form of my earlier work. I called these new, non-hierarchical pictures, “field photographs,” because everything in the frame was now in play, and the more complex and open-ended I could make the image the more interesting it became to me. I felt I was testing the descriptive limits of the photograph by asking; how much dissonance can a photograph contain and still be readable? Can interesting pictures be made without depending on a central event to hold it together? What does color mean in a photograph?
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Within the first two years of working with the view camera I developed four bodies of work; Cape Light, St. Louis and the Arch, the Empire State Building and the Florida pools at dusk series. Each of these inquiries helped teach me how to bring the spontaneous, jazzy riffs of street photography closer to the more contemplative, classical tempo of the large format camera. Previously, photographs held themselves to intimate dimensions: little mirrors of the world, but large format color film offered a grain-less expansiveness which allowed tiny details far away to be clearly seen. With that discovery came a certain risk, I began to see differently, little things mattered more; the way light defined a space, the wind brushing the surface of the water, the way a persons clothes fit, relationships between places and people. … I began to see that people were interesting. I found I could ask to make a photograph of someone, and then, in effect, was granted a license to stare at another human being. Skin, hair, scars, beauty marks, the way clothing looked and what it said about the people who wore it became a new fascination.” (interview in toomuchchocolate)
Posted 2 years ago
