(soft piano music)
(mellow jazz music)
- It's been 20 years,
since I took the last pictures from here.
I spent three-four years photographing
this incredible view of the Bay over and over again.
Take this out.
Put the film in.
I was stunned.
You'd think that the Golden Gate Bridge
would always look the same.
It's never the same.
When I look back on my works, it's a time machine.
It triggers memories that otherwise are gone.
(muffled chatter)
- I met Richard at a dinner party at Thanksgiving.
(switch clicks) (projector whirs)
But we really clicked when I did a story on him
for Mother Jones about the bombing range
that he was working on.
I have actually written a lot about our lives together,
on the road.
At some point, I'm not sure if I should read that.
- And action.
- It has been 12 years now of this adventure
joining Richard on his travels to remarkable sites.
What stands out most,
the post-apocalyptic landscape of Bravo 20.
Its stillness of things obsessively, methodically destroyed.
His affinity for the desert runs deep.
A landscape many consider a wasteland.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here, the earth is alive, simultaneously old and new.
There are salt beds as bright as snow
and silver-green pickets, white dunes,
and rock formations as improbable as any modern sculpture.
He was incredibly passionate about everything that he did
and he also had a great sense of humor.
♪ Moo, moo ♪
♪ I saw you standing alone ♪
♪ Without a calf of your own ♪
They've never run away from me before. (chuckles)
- I think the whole thing was rather enchanting.
(mellow jazz music)
- Eric, I'm coming down. We can pin up somethin'.
- Okay.
- In the early days, Myriam traveled with me.
Otherwise, nobody's ever gone with me
across the country to take pictures.
She went to the dead animal pit, bombing ranges,
the nuclear test site.
It's freezing in here.
These were a lot of places where I was very
politically involved, as well as photographically.
- In the early days he asked me something about a photograph
and I said, "Well, it's beautiful."
And he said, "'Beautiful' is an empty signifier."
I went, "Oh, okay."
- I know that the viewer can't
think what I'm thinking and that's fine.
They're not supposed to.
But I wanted everything I created here
to have a conceptual foundation.
- He can't help it.
Even when it's something incredibly beautiful,
he will always find some sort of significance.
We've always gone to the same place in Hawaii,
but he only thought about photographing
the water after 9/11.
He looked down and he saw these bodies.
- You see these small figures in this vast sublime ocean
and you realize how vulnerable we are.
Photographs, when they're made,
can shift meaning with time, and often do.
There's lots of pictures I like right away, but I know
that I'm gonna change my mind.
So I shoot them. I test them.
I make small prints. Then I make large prints.
Then I kind of put 'em away,
sometimes for a year or two years.
Then I can see them really fresh, like for the first time.
(peaceful music)
- In the warehouse, which serves as Richard's studio
and was, until recently, our home,
there is a long dark corridor,
laden with shelves of negatives and contact prints.
Tens of thousands of them.
Most of them will never see the light of day
but they all harbor the potential for life.
I think of them as dormant witnesses.
Each one, a record of a single moment and place.
For me, knowing that Richard will not,
cannot throw them away,
adds to the mystery of the photographer's process.
(cardboard scrapes)
- On these shelves are about 30,000 eight-by-ten negatives
that have never been printed before.
On this side here are boxes of contacts.
There are so many gems in there.
I found these beautiful images I'd never printed before.
This is my beautiful wife, Myriam, in the desert.
When I made these, I couldn't really print them
because they might have had a scratch,
or the color might have been off.
So I put them away and I didn't throw them out.
Now today, with digital technologies,
it's possible to scan them and fix errors.
Oh, look at these night skies.
I've never printed these before.
(mellow jazz music)
- I just think he senses that time is running out
and he just wants to do more.
He's become more experimental.
He's open to pushing more boundaries.
Just letting go of some of the structures
that he'd lived by in the past.
It's just like, "No, why not?"
You know? Why not do that?
Just, just break the rules.
(energetic piano music)
- Got it.
Let's slide this one down that way.
Part of my routine for many, many years is for me to drive
for two or three weeks looking for photographs.
In the meantime, though, I have done experimental bodies
of work over the years that kind of shake me up,
make me think about things differently.
I would say that this photograph comes out of that
experimentation mode.
The original image is like twigs and branches on vegetation
with a technique that I use in Photoshop
to separate the color values.
It unnormalizes it and allows
for different kinds of interpretation.
In some respects, this neuron scrub
could look like a Jackson Pollock painting, but it doesn't.
You still have some realism there.
You still have some semblance of natural forms
that you recognize.
It's been interesting.
Recently, I was commissioned to do all of the art
for the Pritzker Psychiatric Clinic in San Francisco
that's just being built and I couldn't travel for that.
- COVID happened at that moment, and so what to do?
He couldn't go out there and photograph anew.
He had to mine what he already had.
- I got all the kinds of ideas of taking old images
and rethinking them in ways I'd never thought about before.
- "How can I bring life into them?"
And before you know it,
he was looking at all sorts of things
that he probably would not ever ever have considered before.
Every day, he'd be sitting there and say,
"Oh, you can't imagine what I found.
Come and look at that. Come and look at that."
- I would make thousands of experiments with Photoshop.
I would just play with them, experiment, fool around.
Variations on variation.
And the whole project took off from there.
(mellow percussive music)
- One of the big challenges that we face in psychiatry
in general, in medicine,
and in really embracing psychiatry's part of medicine,
is this lack of care and respect for inpatient facilities.
There's just a very direct opportunity to use art
to say that we care.
Beauty is important.
We really hope that anyone who walks in the door here
can be uplifted by the physical environment.
That all of that will contribute a sense of optimism
and hope.
- I'm in awe of the fact that the Pritzker Clinic picked me.
A lot of my work is very tough work.
Things that could be a potential trigger.
Not the kind of thing you would expect
in a psychiatric clinic.
I've dealt with very, very challenging issues.
Cancer alley, petrochemical America, the border wall.
But I always wanted to balance that
with really beautiful things.
Like the sea.
Sky pictures.
The Golden Gate Bridge.
It's like a foil against the darker projects that I've done.
(distant waves crash)
50 years, looking back,
I realized I needed beauty in my life.
- When he senses a photograph to be taken,
his attention turns away from everything else.
"Time out", he asks politely.
His face takes on a weird, strained air.
It's the sort of face you make when you're completely alone,
unselfconscious.
If he feels that you're watching, he smiles,
and occasionally apologizes.
(camera shutter clicks)
He is unsparing in his determination.
Hours go by.
He waits.
We all wait.
He waits for the light to do things.
Things he has learned to expect from experience.
"Look over there", he'll call out,
pointing to a section of cloudy sky.
"In about five minutes,
the light is going to be incredible."
Often, there are surprises.
(mellow jazz music) (camera shutter clicks)
(camera shutter clicks)