It just struck me that one of the things about photography that made it such a compelling medium to deal with is that it is perhaps the most contradictory of mediums.
What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.
You have the literalness of a glass on a table – and at the same time of that evidential authority that you can’t get around, there is the possibility of universalizing the subject – of getting the whole world into the picture.
When you shoot on film, you don’t know whether you’ve got it or not until you get the film processed, and so it changes the relationship we have with the subject whether it’s a landscape or a person in a so-called controlled environment in a chair in a studio in front of you.
No medium is more limited than any other. It’s what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.
Adolescence is interesting. I mean, all of life is interesting and all of life is transitionary. But I think there is an exponential growth physically, intellectually, emotionally and there is so much potential.
On practical level I can’t pick up the camera until I think I know what I want. I don’t wander around. It’s almost impossible for me to pick up a camera… it’s really hard.
Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white. We’re always subject to what I call the compression industry, which is an attempt to compress a million shades of grey with a little bit of black and white to just a hundred, or to ten, or to one!
I have always found the suburbs very beautiful – the light, the change of seasons and so on. I am not so interested in the political dimensions of these things.
In every form of art, you really want the experience of the images to transcend the medium, for the medium to disappear into the greater experience of viewing the work. So that you forget you are looking at a painting, or a photograph.
All of those a requickly made decisions. The fact that you can see the images right away in a funny way makes the whole relationship more casual. I don’t want a casual relationship with my subject.
I didn’t have any witticisms to land on suburbia. I was really just interested in how beautiful it was. I felt it was like a dreamscape and once I understood that was how I needed to approach it the dream started to expand in unusual ways.
I could be standing in the supermarket, and there is a person standing down the aisle, who is reading the back of a cornflakes box but everything about them is going “It’s me! I’m the one you want! I am the necessary subject. This is it!”
It’s a profoundly different thing to be able to refer to the images you are taking at the time and check them out on a laptop that is plugged into your Hasselblad and go “oh no, do it again, do it again”.
When you go to a great concert something that happens is there is a deep sense of communality and connectedness one to another – as though we are all looking to eachother and saying yeah, we get it, we’re all on one page.
As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I’m convinced it’s not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It’s a bit like young girls and horses.
I was always amazed at how beautiful the light was. At different times of the day the landscape becomes a different place. Dawn and dusk, it’s a different place.
