To Be An Artist, You Have To

When I Was A Boy, My Family Took Great Care With Our Snapshots. We Really Planned Them. We Made Compositions. We Posed In Front Of Expensive Cars, Homes, That Werent Ours. We Borrowed Dogs. Almost Every Family Picture Taken Of Us When I Was Young Had A Different Borrowed Dog In It.

I've Worked Out Of A Series Of No's. No To Exquisite Light, No To Apparent Compositions, No To The Seduction Of Poses Or Narrative. And All These No's Force Me To The Yes. I Have A White Background. I Have The Person I'm Interested In And The Thing That Happens Between Us.

Photography Has Always Reminded Me Of The Second Child.. Trying To Prove Itself. The Fact That It Wasn't Really Considered An Art.. That It Was Considered A Craft.. Has Trapped Almost Every Serious Photographer.

It's In Trying To Direct The Traffic Between Artiface [sic] And Candor, Without Being Run Over, That I'm Confronted With The Questions About Photography That Matter Most To Me.

Start With A Style And You Are In Chains, Start With An Idea And You Are Free.