so what happened in the LA Times on
Friday
you have Donny Youngblood who's a
sheriff in Kern County talking about
violence you have police pushing back
protesters and you have a great catch
made by a baseball player
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you know I pick up my first hammer
actually on my ninth birthday it was
given to me as a birthday present I was
born in 1961 and the life magazines and
looked magazines that were strewn in the
house were things that I sat and looked
at as a child a lot and began to think
about what it meant to make photographs
and how these photographs begin to
actually create a larger narrative but I
started mapping things out at that point
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being in having was the first body of
work that actually got shown in a
gallery so one of the things that I was
doing is you know we're still looking
around in relationship to my
neighborhoods and my communities and at
the same time I was going out with my
friends on my motorcycles all dressed up
in leather and wearing fake mustaches
and and so basically I had all my gave
my friends money to go buy mustaches at
the Hollywood wig store on Hollywood
Boulevard there's humor in it but also
within humor you can explore all these
kind of other relationships of what it
is to deal with homophobia and how its
constructed within our society I was
making myself vulnerable because I knew
that I had to put myself within the body
of work for the body of work to actually
function in in relationship to a larger
identity that I couldn't just be a
lawyer within my own community that I
had to be a participant in it without
representation you can't make change and
I think that all of us are incredibly
vulnerable and that's where this base of
fear comes through is is vulnerability
in the lack of education and so
community is a great way to begin to
articulate the more complex ideas around
that
constantly try to reinvent your own self
as an artist I think the huge shift for
everybody who had thought of me just as
the studio photographer who is making
queer photographs all of a sudden they
were looking at platinum prints of
freeways and I remember the first time I
showed them was in Long Beach this
person looking at the photographs and
going oh they've got the wall labels
wrong this isn't Catherine Opie's work
and it was like okay that was exactly
why I had to make that shift because if
you look from age 9 all the way through
of never not putting down a camera there
is so many different layers and
relationship to what I'm interested in
in terms of creating representations I
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think it's really hard to be a
photographer right now the incredible
amount of images in our society have
allowed us to read images really quickly
but what is that quickness in
relationship to how images form history
so I've been collecting every cross
section of magazine as well as every LA
Times since Trump has been elected
and everyday all the images are cut out
of the newspaper
a lot of guns you know hands holding
guns swing Keys slinkys and guns who
knows I would never want to say good
subject matter but I feel like pressing
up against it is important in
relationship to understanding the
incredible complexities that we face in
terms of humanity and living in this
world I know how photography can serve
us and what it is supposed to be doing
but is it doing it in a way that's
allowing the discourse to move forward
is a place of great questioning for me
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