You know, when I started as a photographer, you know, if you're lucky enough you get
an agent or someone to help sell your work and I remember showing them some pictures
I took, my first agent, and the woman said, you know, you take the still life picture.
What are you doing?
You take still life pictures.
I'm spending all this time trying to convince people that you're a great still life photographer
and now you're showing me a landscape or whatever, I show a portrait and I just thought, how
are you supposed to live a life bound to a teeny little category if you can allow yourself
to not be bound by the medium you're working in, especially now, there's more of a possibility
of you creating things and you finding satisfaction through the work that you're doing, I think.
Something that we all think about, especially in the early days, like in art school, is
this course of voices that comes up every time we look at a piece of material or think
about responding to a piece of material, every blog you've read, every piece of art
you've seen, every movie, every piece of material that's entered your mind all of a sudden has
a voice and speaks up when you look at material or when you go think about making something.
A lot of my focus in terms of my own development I've noticed is that I'm just trying to quiet
the voices down that come up so that I can simply get to the point where I find my honest
response to something and when you honestly respond to something, it's unique because
you responded to it.
Looking back at the work that I've been committed to for the last 10 years or so has been a
three-step process for me, which is to have a concept.
It's important to me to have this initial sort of curiosity and idea, I wonder what
happens if, a sort of question.
Once I have a concept, I can collaborate because I can say to people, this is my idea, this
is what I'm after, and I can help them locate themselves in the project.
Concept is really important.
Then after that, I come up with a system.
I start to develop a system for data collection.
People say, oh, you shoot on white, you like white, it's like, no, white is a solution
to a problem.
It would be so muddled if we were looking at Mandela in his office in South Africa and
you turn the page and you see Frank Garry in his office in LA and all these different
spaces that have been that the white sheet has just covered up, somehow made it about
what I was after rather than what surrounded it.
If I go out and I photograph animals, I decide I'm going to shoot 200 species all on white
because I'm interested in our connectivity to the species rather than what separates
us.
I'm interested in portraying that in a space that allows for the first time for a viewer
to see everything they have to offer.
Well, it's a lot harder if you're looking at the elephant in Africa.
I don't live in Africa, all of these things separate us more.
So that's the sort of stage two is a systematic collection of data and organization of data.
So then I could say, well, you know, in a book, you want to have the singular experience
or each person has their own interview and the film, I can create the larger conversation.
I can have a group of other films in an app that could be individual five minute films
and I can create these multiple entry points.
Everything makes me happier than building a space that has so many doorways that no
matter what road you come in on, you can find a way in.
You know, when I did the animal work, it was so great to have a museum show, have a sort
of art book, but then have a children's ABC book.
The data didn't change, but the entry point changed.
And I think that the game gets very big when you can engage with all different kinds of
people, the distribution channels are endless.
