Throughout the history of photography
we see photographers moving the bar
regarding where they're finding charged material,
what material they find of interest
and 50 years ago
it wouldn't have been found
in a grilled cheese sandwich
I started photographing food
as part of the series American Surfaces
where I was also photographing
every person I met on the trip,
every bed I slept in,
every toilet I used,
residential architecture, commercial architecture,
every television set I looked at,
there were a whole series of categories,
and food was one of them
and food was fascinating
I engage with it at least three times a day
and so it was a feature of the trip
and it was also,
as with any of these categories,
it was a way of opening a door
into the culture I was walking through and exploring
The major visual issue for me with American Surfaces
was how to take a picture that felt natural,
is the term I would use--
I used at the time
I wanted to take a picture that looked like seeing
If you can imagine the difference
between how you speak and how you write,
and that there is a little bit more formality,
perhaps a little bit of a more staid quality,
to how you write
I wanted to explore that difference
Is there a difference between how I see
and how I photograph?
And why is there that difference
and can I overcome it by being aware of it?
Uncommon Places grew out of American Surfaces
I wanted to be able to make larger prints
and the color negative film at the time
wasn't really capable of it
So I wanted to go to a larger negative
and found that I liked working on a tripod
That led me to really alter
the way I was working
and began a long process
of formal exploration in photography
So I got an 8 by 10,
and that's the camera
I used for the rest of the series
One of the realities of an 8 by 10 in color
is that the process is very expensive
So I had to economize somewhere
and it was to only take one picture of anything
I mean, that if I were photographing a building
I would choose one angle
It made any picture a much longer venture
because I have to walk around
and see the different possibilities
I didn't intend for this to be an educational process,
it was simply an economic decision
But what I found was it was forcing me to decide,
"What did I really want?"
There could be five, or 10, or more,
equally visually valid pictures made
There could be a hundred equally valid pictures made
But I had to decide what I wanted
And I found that over time,
doing this again,
and again, and again,
that a kind of certainty began to develop
In 73 I took a picture of a billboard
with a painting of Mount Shasta on it
and behind the billboard was this spectacular sky
that was far grander
than the conception of the artist
who painted the billboard,
which was sitting in a kind of scrubby landscape
and it's a wonderful picture
but when I look at it I sometimes think,
"Tt's a no brainer,"
and than I have other pictures,
like the one of the grilled cheese sandwich,
that's more about really looking at the world
with attention,
seen in the state of heightened awareness
Everyone knows the expression,
"A picture is worth a thousand words,"
and that's simply not true
There are some thoughts that it's impossible
to describe in a picture
and there is an experience of looking at a photograph
that no number of words can communicate
The more words you use
the longer it takes to read it
and you lose the simultaneity of the experience
and the specificity of the description
That's why I take the picture
If I could put it into words
with as much clarity and complexity
it would save me a lot of money
on gas and a lot of time
I could just write it