I also focused on art history in college and was fascinated with how the two departments—fine arts and art history—approached art. In the fine art and photography programs we were encouraged to make an emotional connection and respond to the work, and we were shown work for inspiration and to connect with individual artists. In art history it was a more analytical approach. There was discussion of the merits of the work and how it fit into the culture. I liked flipping back and forth between the two. My family is very analytical and word oriented. Everyone else in my family are attorneys, or even lawyers, (laughs) very language oriented with a bit of a taboo towards the visual. So I was fascinated with the language discussions about visual themes. I think about that when I make my work--the role of myself as an art producer, then also, as a self-critic, or how the work might be interpreted.
Most artists, whether they are completely conscious of it or not, do consider various perspectives on their work.
What’s interesting to me is that if you studied art history you can put references in your work. But you realize that not everybody will understand or be inspired by those references. I like to think about what level does this work on for people who don’t know the reference.
I’ve noticed about your work that you go to the meta-level, and the meta-meta level.
I like my work to have a point of access on different levels.
After college then what did you do?
I moved to California in 1991. I met my wife who was a graduate student in French Literature at Berkeley and we decided to stay in California.
I was interested in California assemblage art and the New Topography school of photography. The SFMOMA was very strong in photographic art, so all that drew me. And then the parties (laughs).
That’s one of the most interesting things about your photography, that you make these assemblages and then photograph them. You were influenced by Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Bruce Connor, people like that?
I loved that work. The assemblage artists had such a warm aesthetic. But then also from California, the New Topographic photographers like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz were sort of colder, more conceptual artists. I found the same tension in my own work between expression and warmth, particularly in my choice of materials like the assemblage artists used, but then within a more rigid conceptual framework.
I don’t know the New Topography school; tell me a little about them.
They grew out of the school of documentary landscape and architectural photographers. They were photographing the changing face of California. As opposed to, say, Ansel Adams, whose work at first was political and instrumental in forming the national parks but then as California changed and it wasn’t that uncontaminated beautiful place anymore, Adams’ work became like an advertising slogan for California. The reality had become subdivisions and industry, so this new school of photographers documented that changing reality.
What did you do when you first got here?
I did an internship at the SFMOMA photography department for six months and it was fascinating to see the range of their collection-- they were cataloging it before they moved to their new location. I saw a huge amount of the work, and I saw what goes on in a museum, and the politics. So that was interesting!
Then I started teaching classes at the ASUC studio at UC Berkeley, their public access art facility. I worked there for 6 or 7 years, developing their digital photography program. This was during the transition between traditional photography and digital photography. People were coming to Photoshop from a design background but we created a program to teach photographers who wanted to mimic traditional techniques, such as control of tonal values like you would do in the darkroom, rather than doing anything you possibly could do.
People were doing some crazy stuff with Photoshop when it first came out with all those filters …
That ties in with what I do now. I don’t collage elements or do composite shots. I clean up backgrounds and things, but I limit myself to the standardized techniques of the product shot.
Did that come out of doing commercial work? When did you start doing that?
It comes out of what I do for advertising. I started freelancing as a commercial photographer at the same time I was teaching at the ASUC studio, then I transitioned into it fulltime in the mid to late 90s.
So you do catalog, portrait…
Editorial on location, advertising work. I wanted to keep my personal artistic practice separate from the commercial, but the higher end of commercial photography is sometimes considered an art form so it gets a little confusing. I like doing the really simple things like the product stuff, it’s easier to compartmentalize as a job. What I found is that I was doing lots of catalog work, about 50 shots a day on white backgrounds. I refined the technique and on one level it seemed technical and boring, but then I realized it was an interesting space to explore for my artwork in the sense that it’s a consumer advertising space; a space of desire, and if you can insert something into that space, there’s already a pathway. It’s like a delivery system or channel that people are conditioned to respond to.
You’re showing your photography at Mercury 20 in April with Charlie Milgrim, and she said the same thing, that her work came out of her advertising involvement, in her case with window display.
I look at it as like a drug receptor in your body, there’s a space where it expects a natural hormone and you can insert something in there… (laughs)
That’s what she figured too; she could slip it in there… (laughs)
That’s the access point where you don’t necessarily need a whole bunch of references. It’s an entryway for everybody because they are used to feeling in this space.
So, describe how you create a photo. The evolution of an idea through to the finished piece.
The first stage is where I collect the raw materials. I look for detritus; everyday objects with potential for vocabulary. As I said I was very influenced by the West Coast assemblage aesthetic, so that type of material. I collect a lot of stuff and keep it sometimes 10 or 15 years. I start assembling them in little clusters and playing over time with combinations. I tend not to pre-visualize what it is they are going to be but see what resonances there are between the things. Then I step away for days, weeks, or years, sometimes. I’ll bring new items in. Depending on experiences I have over time or other artwork I get interested in, sometimes I’ll see new relationships between things. All of a sudden I’ll think, “Oh, that thing reminds me of this.”
That all happens in one place, in my basement, actually. The next stage, when I feel they’ve matured, I bring them to my photo studio. I’ve discovered that things that may work as discreet sculptural objects don’t necessarily work as photographs of them.
Why, do you think?
Because there’s a risk that it just looks like you’re documenting a sculptural object. That is one of the other things I do commercially; taking images of artists' work and creating promotional materials for them. That’s a codifying system, where you elevate things; it’s part of the art machine. So doing that is one thing, and what’s interesting to me is then to think about the still life as a genre of photography and how still life photography can take stuff that isn’t necessarily independent sculptural form and render it as interesting subject matter. What I found is that if it’s too independent as a sculpture, the reading of it just looks like a representation of the work rather than an independent one.
That’s a fine line you’re walking there.
I conceptualize it as things that have photographic potential rather than creating a successful sculptural object and taking a picture of it. The transformation and the elevation of the subject matter by presenting the photographic work—that’s part of the power. To see it in the photographic space, I think I have more control. I try to get away from the preciousness of the objects themselves.
So you put them together as a mental construct of found objects and you photograph them on a white background as if they were a product. You’ve said that you’re taking a product shot of your mind.
They started out as the product shot and now I’m creating more of a still life for the camera; it’s evolving a little bit. The genre of still life photography might be one of the least developed and so it’s an interesting constraint.
It’s not really associated with much contemporary work.
It’s also a studio-based practice. A lot of photographers go out in the world capturing unique things and places. I’ve been thinking about this with Bernd and Hilla Becher, the photographers I have been very interested in for some time, traveling around, being out in the world and capturing these images as they did. Well, in painting and sculpture there is a tradition of working in the studio, absorbing the world outside and then reflecting on it in the studio. I’m thinking about how I always found it difficult to be out in the world trying to take pictures because I can’t feel things as much but I like to take experience back into the studio. The real thing is a physical description but back in the studio you can model how it felt. There’s a distillation and an abstraction that happens in the assemblage and in photographing it in the studio. I think it better reflects the emotional experience and the idea. I’ve made a conscious effort to take out some of the literary and punch-line aspects in my newer work.
Your new work is influenced by -- and a commentary on -- the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are a German couple who photographed the industrial landscape in a serial fashion.
In college I did my thesis on vernacular architectural photography. Instead of photographing renowned structures, like cathedrals, these photographers explored more democratic, utilitarian structures so that the photographing of it is more extraordinary than the actual structure itself. The Bechers’ series of water towers is often read as form reflecting function. Their first book of photos was called Anonymous Sculptures, that’s how they were appreciating them. My series in college was photos of VFW Halls. They are very common in New England, every town has one. I found that the architecture was really not grand at all, they were closed off, non-expressive structures. They tended to be made of cinderblock.
I’m picturing one right now. They are kind of like bunkers.
It’s interesting because a lot of them were put up around the Vietnam War era. They express some sort of divide between people who have been through that war experience. The facades are both expressive and non-expressive at the same time. It was expressive in how non-expressive it was. It was a breakdown of the Bechers’ paradigm, that you could record these things where the form doesn’t reflect the function and yet it does. I found that humorous…and tragic.
I am really interested in the Becher’s work: its popularity, the way it’s been interpreted, and why I was so attracted to it? I felt really warm to it even though it had a cold, analytical look to it. I think I bring some emotional baggage to their work. When I was young I collected model trains. The trains are industrial miniatures and collecting is a nostalgic behavior. Even though industrialism contaminated the natural world, I have an affectionate feeling towards it. I recognized that the Bechers also reflect the joy of collecting in their work.
But there is also the different ways the work has been interpreted, how it relates to the anthropology and documenting of a vanishing era. And also to minimalism, their work fit right into that movement, whether they intended it or not. It’s also been seen as obsessive, Germanic behavior, a really rigid documentary thing. I don’t know, I found it all really appealing and recently I’ve been starting to think about the dynamic between the couple. I don’t know if there’s any factual basis to my imagining, but I’m not sure it really matters, it can be a fiction I tell myself. They were a couple—he was an abstract painter and she was an anthropologist – and they found this common ground in documenting these utilitarian structures.
It was a compromise, what’s a better word for that? (Laughs) Like a marriage, a collaboration.
The product of a great love between them, and it seemed to me a very romantic activity, which is quite at odds with the traditional reading of their work.
So critics didn’t see the love there, but you did.
(Laughs) I like to think of artistic practice as a behavior, rather than necessarily a production. So they had this behavior that they did together and it was rewarding. They traveled all around seeking out these structures that they could photograph from a similar vantage point. I imagine they spent a lot of time in hotels and motels…a lot of coordination there. Maybe it was kind of romantic that they had room service… Then their work was well received, they might have thought, wow, we can keep doing this, how cool.
I can see that. The sexy side of photographing water towers. (Laughs) So, how long have you been married?
I’ve been married nine years. But I’ve known my wife for sixteen years.
It’s a great pleasure for a couple to do some activity where they share interests and skills. I’m sure their initial attraction is based on those things, and the process of the marriage is figuring out what they are exactly and then building on that. I’m thinking about couples I’ve known who collect things; it’s a project they work on together.
Actually there’s a lot of love in collecting. Do you love the things you’re collecting, or the process, or the person you’re collecting with?
Driving in the car together…the whole experience. So how does that all play out in the series you have done, The Architecture of Love?
It’s an interesting conceptual starting point for me, being inspired by a photographic series that’s widely regarded as cold, analytical and rather boring. The point of access to allow myself to create work that is warm and expressionistic based on what was commonly considered cold and analytical is by delving into the romance of the activity of making it, and the couple’s relationship. Maybe they had a bad marriage, I don’t know, but I don’t think they could have. I imagine one of the great romances, that they could go to all these barren industrial sites for 35 years and…
And keep doing it.
There must be a lot of love in there. That gives me a pathway for my photographic expressions that I hope are aesthetic, beautiful pictures. I’m working with detritus, common found materials like pipe parts and piles of gravel, and using these everyday materials to model their behavior, but in the studio.
Seeing the work I made the association with the Bechers’ water towers right away. But, in the photographic space that you work with the white background, the pipe parts, which I recognize and I know they aren’t large, they take on a monumental quality, which seems quite humorous.
There’s a perspective trick in shooting up at them. It will be interesting to me if people see them that way. But, they are warm.
As you say, I provide no context. There’s a constant tension in what I do between saying something and saying nothing. The space of showing work in public is a theater of power. There’s a delicate balance for me between being really expressive and saying nothing at all. That ties into my interest in Duchamp, not only in his fascination with plumbing,
Duchamp's "Fountain"
but his behavior. He visited California in his “retirement” and had an enormous impact. So his rejection of the art-making practice, participating or not participating, I’ve sort of reintegrated into my work in the form of the question “how much to say and how genuinely?” Why necessarily prioritize being the behavior of being expressive in the sense of providing a large field of information. The primary function of our brain is to throw out information. (laughs)
