Brooklyn local

How I see these photographs

These are my home-ground pictures. If you had a giant compass, planted the point on the roof of my apartment building, set the radius at 3 miles & drew a circle, all these pictures would fall inside it. Historically, they’re the direct descendants of street shooting by Eugene Atget, Andre Kertecz, Walker Evans & Robert Frank, maybe leavened a bit by color & irony in the more recent tradition of William Eggleston.

My method is to move around waiting for pictures to embed themselves in the world for a single instant -- before they morph into something else. This is even true of supposedly stationary objects, like statues, which are also changing every second. At the moment I claim them, my best pictures are already complete in the world. Drawn directly from what is there, like haiku, they are recognized, not created. They are both descriptively precise & philosophically unreliable. As the great street portraitist Diane Arbus put it, “The more specific you are the more general it will be.”

74 photos | 273 views

items are from between 09 Nov 2003 & 28 Dec 2007.