i've been called a trick photographer
first i was kind of offended by the term
but now i've come to embrace it it does
sum up some of the reasons some people
like my pictures because they're novel
there's a degree of fun or you get to
search and it's a little bit like a
puzzle like a good trick
when i want to describe my selected
people series i say that it's like a
still time lapse photograph smushed in
together in one picture
it what inspired me was
i was sitting outside and just wondering
what happened over time there what
happened over 100 years
you know in 100 years
it would be filled up black with people
all
covering every single inch
making shadows and overlapping and you
know just a dense block of people
and i realized well i could capture some
of that
with the camera
i guess what i'm looking for is a place
overlooking
a certain kind of activity where
there are a lot of people but they don't
clump up too much for me that's the
easiest kind of way to work but
sometimes i also like confusing setups
so we may look for either one i guess
i'm going to take a look over this
interchange here
i can see it's not very busy so that i
know people
cross diagonally and i often look for
places that have kind of an appealing
formal
setup to them
once i set up i leave it for a long time
well i probably take 100 to 300 pictures
i'd like to have people whose faces were
obscured because i think that might be
funny
i'm looking for any kind of interesting
clothing or behavior because if you look
down here it's just like the most
ordinary pedestrian thing in the world
but i find all kinds of interesting
things happen even when you think it's
just nothing
and the first thing that i do
is i just start flipping through
to see what i have
and i go fast and i look for
coincidences or
things i might be planning i'm going to
mark it with a little
photoshop star here
so what i'm thinking is i'm going to
arrange people
very close to this poll with a lot of
people's faces blocked by the pole
but maybe i want to form a vertical line
and you know that's just the first idea
that came to me
so to give away my any technical tips
that i might have is what i've done is
i've copied the whole frame and then
before i prepared this just i found a
blank
image where nobody was walking and it
was the calmest
uh no the fewest number of cars were
parked
just pasting that whole frame over
blocking it out
and then masking her back in and people
talk about the magic of
an image coming up in the dark room you
know it's almost an identical feeling to
me when i start to drop people in like
this
i can work on it for months it's a
little bit like a painting there's no
time you have to stop you can always
keep going and
improve it until you just say i'm done
and then i'm done
i have only one big rule which is that i
don't change anything
always leave things in their original
position
important to have at least an aspect of
truth and realism to my work
one of the key feelings i get when i
look at my own work is that there are
all these tiny little moments
unimportant moments that pass and are
never recorded by anybody you know even
people with their snapshot cameras
nobody cares about a woman who's walking
down the street no wind blows her hair
just like that or she curls her wrists
you know it's just not important or so
for me it captures just a little bit
more of that that is available any other
way
and nobody is going to go and spend
hours looking at
all these tiny little moments and i can
compress them and
smush them together and compile them so
people can
look at them
you