The
Boarding House was a place that I worked in, I guess, for four or five years. It was a big,
empty space of people divided up with blankets, a sheet metal, wood. It was a very strange,
surrealistic place. It was quite a brutal place. It was quite a comic place. Certainly,
it was a place where the human condition exposed itself on all different levels.
So, I think most importantly, in this period, I began to see myself as an artist,
photographer. I began to interact with the subjects. There was a creative process going on
between me and the world around me, and the pictures started to develop more complex meanings
than the previous work. This one's called Mimicry, and this is a very interesting photograph. It
tells you so much about what photography is about, catching a moment, catching a relationship,
and there's the boy's hands crisscross. It ties up with this, you know. There's sort of a hidden
truth, hidden visual truth, that comes out of this picture. A boarding house, by its very nature,
is where people sleep, eat past times. We have a young child here sleeping. Also,
this boarding house, in particular, was full of animals. The animals were all over the place,
whether they're cats, whether they're mice, whether they're rats, whether they're chickens,
whether they're rabbits, they were everywhere you went. And so, in this case, there's a very
interesting dog. And I've always said, the most important thing in this picture is when the
dog's eye turns white. That's the key part of this photograph. That's photography. Photography
is about capturing a moment that can't be repeated. They take you to another zone, another place,
almost a place of the psyche. And I think when people look at the pictures, they shouldn't worry
about where is this place, how did he get into this place? Is it real? Is it unreal? Is it this
or that? The photograph is called Pathos. And when you walked into the boarding house, this stuffed,
animal stuffed ape was right in front of the door to the building. And when people saw this
stuffed animal with the background the way it was, it was sort of an emblem. It was sort of a
metaphor. The people in this boarding house felt a deep pain. But I think this deep pain that this
picture symbolizes is felt by everybody. So Pathos is the deep pain that everybody feels,
but tries to cover it up whether it's through fancy cars, jetting around the world or playing tennis.
We can't get away from it really. And we want everything packaged in so we can put it underneath
the bed and go to sleep at night. You can go, you can try the rest of your life as far as I'm
concerned. Come up with words that define these photographs, but you're still not going to hit
the bull's eye. But in a way that that's what makes good art, that art stands on its own and
doesn't necessarily have to depend on words to explain it. Unfortunately, we live in a world
where everybody, the art just trying to reinforce everything we know or anything. Everybody likes
to be reinforced. So that's actually what art should be doing. It should be actually making
people question the world around them and understand themselves a little bit better. And
that should be the purpose of art. Unfortunately, we don't see that in most things we do. And
we don't see it in most art work.
