I became involved with photography first.
When I was about 14 years old, I used to race BMX bikes and I was the state champion in Ohio for four years.
When I was 14, we had the same kind of impetus to document what we were doing.
Back then, there was no digital cameras. There was nothing. It was just 35mm.
You actually had to know how to take a picture to capture that. That's how I got started.
I just wanted to record my friends doing their BMX tricks.
I think the point that I realized that photography was going to be the thing I did for the rest of my life was probably in high school.
When I started taking a photo class in high school, it was the last semester of the day and it was known that you got there early and you signed into the classroom.
You could go into the dark room and before they turned the lights out, you could sneak out the back door and go and leave school.
For one reason or another, I think that I stayed a few times and I started to do it and I liked it.
I had a teacher named Michael McClure that was really amazing.
He pointed out to me that I was different than his other students and that I had a skill in photography that he hadn't seen before.
He very much encouraged me to continue doing it. I fell in love with it.
By the end of that semester, I was in love with photography and I've actually never done anything since that point.
The way that it works in the United States is that usually you go to an undergraduate school and you're there for four years and then later on you go to a graduate school.
After I was in Boston and I graduated from that school, I worked for two years for a photographer named John Goodman.
I was his assistant and that was a really great experience because in school, the one thing they don't teach you and I guess it's hard. You can't teach this sometimes.
It's just basically the pace of business and how to get things done.
After working for a couple of years for him, I ended up applying to graduate school and that's when I went to California.
California College of the Arts and that's where I first encountered Larry Sultan and studied under him for a couple of years.
I was very interested in retrospect. I was very lucky to work with him at that point because he had done his book Pictures from Home and that book was out in the world.
That's how I learned of him. I saw a show that he was in called The Pleasures and Terrorism of Domestic Comfort at the New York MoMA.
There was a selection of his work in there and it immediately caught my attention.
But then when I went to school with him and study with him, that body of work was finished. It was the books were published, the book was published and the shows were all done.
He was kind of in between projects and in retrospect a very fortunate time to be working with somebody, to have him as my advisor because he was very available.
He was also on the hunt himself for his next project and what he was going to end up doing.
I had this available teacher who was also engaged in finding something for himself.
There was a lot of back and forth between us. We always talked about that and he got as much from me as I got from him.
He would tell me, which I was honored by, but it was a really great time.
Then he ended up going on and doing The Valley. After I got the last year of graduate school when he started doing that work.
I think that Larry, the way he influenced me is I think that he taught me to draw from within from my work.
He taught me to very much trust my intuition and to go with that kind of gut feeling about my work.
Then the other major thing that he pointed out to me was that I had been making pictures of a house, I made some pictures of an interior.
He was the one that pointed out to me that even though I was photographing architecture or buildings or homes or whatever,
he showed me that it was something that I was making pictures about places that talked about people.
Those pictures were not architectural pictures. They were not eutrophic photographs.
They were photographs that had psychology in them.
I think the biggest gift that he gave me was to point that out in my work. He encouraged that in my work too.
Sometimes the way it worked for me, how I start a subject or I start doing something,
for instance, I was photographing houses at night and that was something that just sort of happened.
One day I needed an establishing shot for a sequence of pictures I was doing.
I thought, oh, a house at night will be perfect.
It will be like the house that the people are in for the sequence I was working on for an assignment.
Then I found this place that was naturally lit up by a car dealership across the street.
It had all this light that was shining onto this house and so it was kind of perfect.
I photographed that and then I just made that one picture and then I kind of moved on and I was doing other things later on.
Then I ended up out in the world again driving around. Going out and driving around is really my way of making pictures.
That's my favorite thing to do for picture making, just to get the car to drive around.
I ended up countering another one and then I photographed it and then slowly but surely I found this neighborhood
that looked very much like an east coast neighborhood and it was also really foggy.
I'll never forget when I came up the hill to that neighborhood into the fog.
It was a suburb in the cloud. It was perfect and scary because I remember thinking,
I can't believe that people live here. It's so spooky and dark.
You couldn't see across the street a third of the year because it was so foggy.
I ended up making pictures there for a long time and that was just kind of an accident.
In terms of how I encountered interiors, same thing.
I think I was on a road trip and I photographed a hotel room that I was staying in.
I remember I woke up in the morning, the light was coming in the room.
I remember sitting across in the bed and looking at the light, how amazing it was.
Then I ended up making a picture there. That was the start of me doing interiors.
Then with the landscapes, I clearly remember the way that happened was,
I was scouting around during the day for some photographs to go back,
for some places to go back to at night to take pictures out.
I stopped at a stop sign. It was in the wintertime.
I stopped at a stop sign and there was a bunch of snow that had melted on top of the car.
Then all this water rushed down the windshield at a four-way stop sign.
I remember looking at that and seeing this suburban scene go from being clear to being a wash of memory.
Then I grabbed my camera and I took the picture and just one frame,
which is what I never do one frame, but it was just a snap.
Then I moved on, but when I got back and I saw that contact sheet,
I realized I saw there was something there that was very different than I had been taking before.
I explored that a little bit more.
For me, I can only really talk about my own experience,
but I think I've seen this a lot is that with photography, it's a kind of medium, it's a serial kind of medium.
It's a medium where often you make a picture that you like
and then the best thing to do is to go out and try to make that picture again.
You'll never recreate it. You'll make something different that has variation to it.
Then you go out and try that again and again.
Then ultimately you end up with a bunch of pictures that have this feeling or a theme to them,
but they're not all quite the same.
Then one of the things I always say to my students is that with photography,
repetition is your enemy and your friend.
It's something that you have to be repetitious enough to be consistent to follow through and make a body of work,
which if you're too repetitious and boring, it's too much.
It's always about finding that balance.
It's something that every body of work has its own balance.
I've done those same sets of things for their entire career and that's that.
That worked for their work and then there are other things where I've got a body of work of four close homes
where I've only made 13 photographs and that's all I ever need to make of that because that's perfect.
The weather has been really like something that's been important to me because there's a mood.
Weather creates a mood and it also creates atmosphere and it creates drama.
Those things equal drama and that's the kind of thing that I'm interested in making a dramatic picture
that has some feeling and emotions with.
I think the way that I think how fiction unfolds in my work or the role that fiction plays in my work
is an interesting one because there's some reason when I'm photographing a landscape or I'm photographing a building
I have this old school kind of notion of I don't change anything.
I don't ever go and ask somebody to turn the light on in the house and I don't say,
hey can you move your minivan out of the driveway and I just will skip that house.
So I don't really arrange the landscapes or I don't arrange an interior
and I like sticking by that rule for myself where I just prefer to discover something instead of making it happen.
Then with landscape pictures my rule with fiction is that obviously you can't make it rain
but you can make moisture happen on windows and sometimes I'll do that.
I remember I was with a writer in Katya Talyovic who was doing an essay for my book
or actually a piece for Foam. She had come to write along with me and she saw me spraying in the window
with a little tiny bottle over here and a little bottle over there and she's like,
you're a painter and I told her, don't tell anybody.
She said, why? You're creating a masterpiece with water and it's not there.
That's nothing to be ashamed of. I thought that was interesting
and she pointed out to me that it was like that.
But I will say and I said this to her, sometimes there's nothing like real rain on a window
and when it's really raining hard and it's coming down and you're deciding,
should I move the wipers or not? Sometimes I drive around in very unsafe conditions with nothing moving
because you never know when it's going to happen again.
But then in terms of the people, the fictional aspect of the people has always been present in my work.
I don't think I've really ever, whenever I approach somebody to take a picture of them
or I never see them as who they are, I always see them as a stand-in
for somebody that might be in my past or like my history.
And I remember there was one thing I learned in this workshop a long, long time ago.
From Judy Dader said this, she said that we all have our cast of characters
and those are the people that like, that's what makes us walk down the street
or walk into a room and say, I'd like to photograph that person and that person and that person
and those ones don't interest me over there. It's an intuition.
You know, it's not going to work or it's going to work.
And then where the fictional part comes in is when they come to work with me,
I definitely, sometimes we'll just shoot very standard pictures that's very much,
it could be considered a document or a portrait of the person
but then sometimes what happens is we start to do things where we're using a wig
or we're using, you know, they're playing a character or they're playing a role
and they might be doing things for the camera or acting for the camera
in a way that they wouldn't normally act in real life.
And I think that that's what's interesting about photography is that like,
sometimes you put somebody in front of the camera and it's a stage for them
and they're able to do, they act out, you know, whatever it is they want to express.
So I find that to be interesting.
I think that the presence versus the absence of humans in the pictures,
where that comes in for me is I think that I very much like a space that feels like
something just happened there or it's about to happen now.
There's something about that, it's got this sort of like pregnant moment in a way
and, you know, and it's sort of a very cinematic part of my work.
I think one of the things that I've been able to do with my work that I'm most proud of
is I was, you know, honored to have been asked by Raymond Carver as a state
to use my photographs on the covers of these reissues they were doing of the books.
I think we ended up doing seven different book covers.
And that was really something I was just very pleased to have done
because Raymond Carver is somebody that, you know, when I read Raymond Carver,
like I see pictures.
Like it's just kind of like one of those writers where I'm just like,
I literally see pictures in my head that I'd be making.
And then also what I really was related to with his work
is that like he, Raymond Carver writes about really difficult real-life situations
that aren't always so great, you know.
And I think that that's something that I am not shy about making pictures of as well.
And I think that, you know, our kind of work beats the place.
So I was really delighted to be able to have one of my pictures of a house at night
on the cover of a book that says, titled, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
You know, it's like, that's what I was talking about, you know.
So it's kind of perfect, you know, it's a really perfect match, I think.
That's interesting, the idea of an aftermath diary.
I like that. I've never heard that before.
It's probably a translation thing, which I like.
It's perfect, actually, because it works.
Because that is kind of what it is.
It's kind of like the book that I recently published was called,
Excerpts from Silver Meadows.
And it was a book that was something that I wanted to make a book about.
I'd always hinted at kind of like where my pictures were about where I came from
and things were about me in some way.
But every picture is an autobiographical picture.
Anything an artist does, it's not something about them.
But I wanted to make pictures that really focused on that.
This is something that I definitely learned from Larry,
is that you can only talk about yourself so much.
And that when your work is really talking,
it's talking about something that's beyond you.
And it's sort of like your experience of your family is something
that other people can relate to.
And that's when your work is working, when that happens.
And that's transcendent, I guess, is that what that means?
Or it transcends you, I know that.
So I had started making these pictures.
I had started organizing them.
And then when the time comes to, the certain time comes when you're done,
you've shot enough stuff and you know,
and it's time to start making it into like the editing and putting it,
like selecting the images.
And I always start by editing a book.
That's where I was going to, I knew it was going to be a book
because I was able, I know I'm able to publish the book with my publisher now, really.
So I just started making, I had a pile of photographs
and I started making a book dummy.
And I always like doing it that way because I feel like,
whether I'm getting ready for a show of work or I'm going to start
some of the images, I always end up making a book.
Because a book has something that,
a book is the perfect form to like sequence and figure out your pictures in
because it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
And most books that you pick up, they make some sense for them
even if they're not good, they still make a little bit of,
there's like a, there's a narrative sense that occurs within a book.
And so you're kind of forced to put it in,
you have to think what's going to be first, you know,
and how am I going to tell my story.
So the perfect vehicle for like figuring out what your work is going to be.
Even if you don't even make a book, it's still good to figure out what it's going to be.
And so I started making that and then as I kind of got further into it,
I started to realize that, you know, there were all these other things I was photographing
that were more than just my particular experience in Ohio.
You know, there were kind of more about things I would hear on the news
or things I would hear on the radio and, you know,
like current events that would sort of like seep into my work.
And I ended up making a book that has 130 photographs in it.
And for me, that's like three books.
You know, like most of my books have about 25 to 35 pictures in them.
And, you know, this is actually four books, I know.
And it feels like that.
It's like really got a lot of images in it.
And then one of the other things that I started doing at that same time was I had been photographing
with multiple cameras, like the same exact subject at the same time.
And, you know, it was nothing fancy like a three-camera setup.
It was just like I took a picture of the person with the Pentax.
I grabbed my 126 snapshot camera.
I took a picture.
And I would grab my little black and white camera and take a picture.
And then just to kind of see what they looked like,
because, like, as Gary Winnigrand has taught us, the world looks different photographed.
That's what he would always say.
Why don't you take a picture?
Just to see what the world looks like photographed.
And that was something.
And then I remember, I'll never forget there was this one time a model, you know,
it was like, why do you speak cameras?
I was like, because they all make things look kind of different.
They all record it in a different way.
And she was like, oh, you mean they're like different paintbrushes, you know?
And I was like, that's actually the perfect, that's the best explanation of it,
because that's what it is.
It's like they all paint a different picture.
Because sometimes, you know, the black and white 35mm, one was the perfect shot.
And then sometimes the Pentax 6x7 was the perfect shot.
And then sometimes I showed all three of them the same spread, you know,
just to kind of like get at that idea that, you know, this was not a single camera experience, you know,
but it was sort of like, you know, or, and what I think that does is it ends up pointing out
that there's multiple points of view on things, you know.
And I think that that's an interesting thing to think about.
When you're thinking about photography and truth and, you know, you know,
one of the things that Picasso said that I've always stuck with is that art is the lie that tells us the truth.
And I remember, you know, thinking about that a lot when I was making my work,
because I wanted to make a story that, you know,
when I go out to make a story, I don't think just, I know I don't,
but you don't set out to like tell some lies, you know,
you set out to like tell the truth about something.
And, but sometimes you need to use fiction in order to get that, you know, on a piece of film.
So that's kind of my approach to that, how that works.
In terms of book making, I guess I feel like how I know when I'm ready to start to make a new book
is when I've collected together enough photographs.
I have this like pile of pictures that I have not really sorted too much,
which is a deliberate thing, you know.
I have a studio where I have lots of pictures all over the place, you know.
On tables, I don't pin things on the wall very much, I like to have it on tables,
because that way when you move them around all the time,
and sometimes you set something down, you know,
and then it's, you know, it accidentally sits down next to something else,
and you're like, oh, that's great, you know, remember that.
You know, actually I used to take pictures of those kind of things
just to remember what I had seen.
And that's something that, and so you start to pair,
you make pairs of pictures, and then I'll make,
I'll start to pair the pairs, you know,
and then I'll have, you know, four pictures,
and then you put more together, and you kind of string together something,
and then it becomes, you know, it starts to become a critical force of making,
you know, it starts to just become a book, you know,
and I think that the process of making that is something that I love that part of it.
That's almost one of my favorite parts.
And then once you kind of get things together,
and you're headed somewhere and it's making sense,
you realize that there's,
and then you realize all the things that you have to go photograph,
or the things that you, the holes that you're missing,
and that, you know, it might be as simple as like, oh, I need more interiors,
or I need a man, you know, or I need a woman, you know, doing this,
you know, or like being surprised by something or whatnot.
But it's like once you start to sort it out,
then you start to realize that it's actually, it's a good phase of the work
because you, it's rare that I go out and take a picture
where I kind of know what I'm looking for, you know,
and, you know, sometimes that's a nice thing.
It's actually less a gift to know what you're looking for.
I think how I've evolved as a photographer over years,
and I've been doing, I've actually, I've officially been doing this since 1988,
a long time, and actually 1986, so that's when I got out of high school.
So, and I think that how I've evolved as a photographer,
I know exactly how that is, is that I've become really,
one of my strong points is the way that I'm able to sequence images
and use the images to tell, story, you know,
kind of like efficient but poignant way.
You know, I think that my friend Doug Rickard,
who has this website, American Suburbex, he always, he says,
you know, my picture is hit you over the head like a hammer, you know,
and I think that that's something that I like that.
I think that, but not, I mean, not in a way that's like,
not in a, he means that in a good way,
and it's something that they grip, you know,
I think that I'm able to grab somebody's attention with my pictures,
and I'm able to, and then what I, I think in addition to being able to, like,
sequence and make pictures that make sense and can amplify that feeling,
you know, I think that I've just been
more,
more like, I wouldn't say it,
like actually like less, it's actually less
and less, I've been less and less afraid of making really beautiful
pictures, you know, I think that, you know, sometimes when I was,
but I like that I'm able to, like, let go out and make a picture of a house
at night that's super sharp and
totally documentary, and then I'm able to make a picture later on
the next day of landscape through a window that's
completely like a painting, you know, and I think that I like being
able to jump back and forth between those things, you know, and
I think that's one of the things that I've grown.
I've got my finger on, you know, a few different things
that are just one, I'm able to, like,
work with, you know, all this on, but it's what I do.
So let me think about that, that's a good question.
Okay, I figure that.
Advice that I would give to a young photographer today would be,
and I feel like this is important because I feel like, I feel really lucky
to have had a photographic revolution
in the middle of my career, which is exciting, you know.
I was fully analog, you know, and I'm
gracing digital, you know, in a way that I love the fact that I can
handhold my camera at night and take a picture of somebody on the street, like that is a gift
from God to be able to do that.
But advice that I would give to a photographer
is I feel like one of the things that's absent with digital photography a lot of times
is that people don't know how to make an object.
They don't know how to print a picture that's really incredible,
that's on a wall, you know. I feel like, you know, we take pictures of
our phones, we take pictures of all these different kinds of cameras, and
we make things that are just solely for the internet, and
I think, I mean, there's people that have, like, you know, tumblers that, like, they don't ever print anything
ever, you know, and that might work for them, and that might work for
me, I think that you're a real
photographer when you can print that picture out of the camera, or the
computer, or whatever, and make it to a thing.
Not just a, you know, a digital image.
I think that's something that I would, you know, encourage people to learn
how to make great objects out of their photographs,
and to learn that quickly.
