it's human nature to look for purpose or
an answer in everything and I think it's
uncomfortable to accept purposelessness
I think I'm constantly trying to find
some sort of truth or reality and it
does make you question this thing that
we all kind of rest upon which is this
searching for a reason
I guess I'm always functioning in almost
a schizophrenic form where I'm thinking
about the content but I'm simultaneously
thinking about making a very seductive
and effective image and I often fail but
the image can Teeter into this realm of
abstraction and then the text grabs the
dream and brings you back into some sort
of fixed definition that I'm
constructing the innocence documents
cases of wrongful conviction throughout
the United States and photography's use
in the criminal justice system an image
is presented to a victim of a crime and
it replaces the memory of the actual
perpetrator if there ever was one and
this whole idea about how photography
could lead to someone's death on death
row seemed to me this kind of perfect
microcosm to look at the danger in the
ambiguity of photography
an American index was in response to
September 11th in many ways the
government in American media were so
interested in finding secret sites
beyond our borders and during that time
I wanted to look inward at what was
hidden and outside of popular
consciousness within American borders in
contraband before I started I was
imagining what I would end up
documenting heroin and guns and all
sorts of very evident threats and in the
end what it ended up being was a massive
pile of counterfeit goods and it was
everybody chasing the same dream this
universal desire for the same brand the
same luxury item and you just got this
sense of a kind of flattening of desire
the works in a living man declared dead
and other chapters are comprised of
three segments the portrait panel is
where I systematically order the members
of a given bloodline the text panel is
where it present almost census like
information about all the individuals I
photographed and then in what I call the
footnote panel there are these more kind
of abstract images and fragments of the
stories and the imagination and all of
that was the way in which blood is so
ordered and determined that perhaps the
chaos that surrounds us and all the
violent stories of survival in the world
perhaps that itself is patterned as well
I think because of the subject matter
that I'm documenting there is this want
to see expressions of pain or anguish or
to see some sort of deeper warmer more
intimate perhaps sympathetic view and I
purposefully steer clear of all of that
to create this very uncomfortable
engagement for the audience with that
which they're looking at and it also
creates a certain understanding of a
distance between the photograph ER and
the subject where it's clearly stating
I'm coming from a position of not
knowing what that situation is like and
the audience as well the more time I
spend as a photographer the less
interested I am in the medium so there's
definitely this evolution through the
projects in which I'm kind of shedding
aesthetic embellishment whether it be
through through lighting or color or
these narrative scenarios and it just
seems to get more and more bare it's
still using photography but in this in
this very different form and I think the
way in which my generation works is very
interdisciplinary people are working in
all different mediums and in all
different directions and new forms as
well and at best I would hope that it
bridges a lot of these things and enters
into a different territory