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[continued]

The idea for the Oxford thing just came to me out of the blue. About three or four years ago I mentioned it to somebody at a conference, and they evidently told this woman on the Arts Council. She came to me all excited: "Oh, what a great idea. Do it! We'll get you the money, etc. etc." But I wasn't really ready to do it.

I wasn't really interested until there was this meeting at the firehouse a few months before, February or maybe March of '84. It was for people concerned about downtown Oxford, how to make it more appealing. The organizer was a young fellow who's trying to start a grape-growing business here. You know, I own two buildings downtown, the one I live in and the place next-door. And Don, the mayor, was there. He owns three or four places across the street. We comiserate with one another about our renovation projects and stuff like that. I like him a lot. He wants to do things to promote the town, and he's interested in history. He has this dream, for example, of fixing up the old firehouse and the antique truck. He found a tape of a speech President Truman gave at a whistle stop in Oxford. He wants to set that up somehow. The guy who works in the garage around the corner was there, too. There was a bunch of people.

But there was this one couple . . . fascinating. They looked like they'd stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photograph of migrants in the 1930s. There's one that particularly sticks out in my mind ["A Missourian, headed west, asks directions" or "Ditched, stalled and stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California" (1935)]. The guy had that sort of gaunt and intelligent look. There was an elegance about him different than most of the men I'd met in town. The same with his wife. Her look was even more gaunt. She looked like she'd been through a lot. I couldn't take my eyes off of them all night.

Right then I said, "Geez, I'd really like to photograph these people." It evolved from there. I hadn't been doing any kind of photography remotely like portraits or documentary. But there was something about them that I really wanted. I think, more than anything, it was like the reasons I photographed when I first started. I wanted to meet them, get to know them.

As a student and for the first years after, I did portraits. They were mostly candids of people on the street, oh, back about 1966, '67 through '70. My biggest influence was Paul Strand, because I did my thesis on him and I was interested in his work. It had to do with the direct confrontation, a very frontal approach. I always insisted on having some kind of dialogue with whoever I was photographing. I didn't want people to just stand there, waiting for the picture. I learned to involve myself and evoke a sort of physical response. (I must have some old ones around here that I could show you. I don't have them in any kind of order.)

Yeah, here's some. These are later ones. The work did start to change at one point, but it didn't happen all at once. In art school I took print-making, painting, sculpture, a lot of drawing classes. "The art influence!!" Ha! A lot of my work has been somewhat painterly. But as a painter or draftsman you can put what you want in the frame; as a photographer you go about it differently. I was interested in using the frame to create a tension, a vital kind of spatial tension. I can't say I was as aware of it then as I am now. A lot of it was sort of natural at the time. Now I'm much more concerned about it in a very different kind of way. (It's funny. Talking about these is like talking about somebody else's work. It was so long ago.)

It got real frustrating. For me, the act was going out and photographing, and the rest of it was boring. I made good enough negatives so I could come back and just print, knock them out basically. I hated working in the darkroom. But I loved drawing, being able to work and rework images. That's what I was interested in. But you couldn't do it with photographs, and the drawings weren't interesting either. I stopped drawing. The work didn't seem to be going anywhere. I was teaching photography and working in labs -- St. Louis, New York, Massachusetts -- earning next to nothing and doing a lot of hack work.

Manipulation was something that just "wasn't done." You know what I mean? I don't mean I was in the vanguard or anything. Even then there was a lot of people trying to go beyond the straight photograph. But there was a lot of opposition -- like followers of Ansel Adams, F-64, . . . -- where the quality of the image, the purity of the medium, was the most important thing. They were real conservative, and in some places those people are still in power. I never could understand what they were talking about. Now, no one gives a shit, because there's been so much cross-fertilization between painting and photography and all media. But at the time there was a lot of resistance from some quarters to anything beyond the straight image.

Back about 1970, I did one that suggested some possibilities for manipulation -- sandwiching and drawing, that sort of stuff. But I had no idea where the image was or where it came from. I just had an old negative of my father's that was of my cousin and me when we were kids. I made copies and flipped some of them and put them together. It was just this strange image, but it was the start of at least thinking about ways of manipulating photographic materials. I didn't know what to do with it. Mostly I was just doing that other work, real frustrated. It wasn't going well at all that year in New York.

Then this friend of mine, Ben [a pseudonym], committed suicide. That really changed things. There were three of us who were good buddies. (In fact, I've got our picture around here. We had a show together up in Nazareth College or something, Upstate New York, and Ben got his wife to photograph us for the poster.) So his suicide was very difficult. I had to go to the morgue. They even sent me the autopsy report. What a freaky thing. It describes this human body, every blemish, every organ weighed. I was freaked out.

For a year I piddled around in New York and Boston. I did a lot of my own work just at night and on weekends. One day I went to the darkroom with a bunch of stuff -- graphic arts films and pencils, erasers, ink, paint, and scissors -- cut-and-paste stuff. I just started putting things together. The first ones all used images of Ben. Like, I had an old negative of mine where he was horsing around, in a pose like he was hanging, which is how he committed suicide. I used drawings from the autopsy report. And I used some other images, some of my mother that my father took and that, I thought, were rather grotesque. See, like this triptych? (This one isn't a finished print. I used it for the back of something else. But you can see.)

They are some of the strongest things I've ever done. They came out of this work with Ben, the stuff that kept me up at night. I still shudder at them. I call it my "autopsy series." God, those things kept me up for years! Death, I guess. I just couldn't understand it. It became like an obsession.

But after those early ones, 1973, I moved to Iowa, to a farm. We had 60 cows and 47 calves. After a while, I burned out on death. I guess it was just that . . . on the farm something was being born and dying everyday. I realized that was what it was all about. Near the end the questions were more about my own life and death. So, I started using images of myself: real self-conscious stuff. I covered my face with oil or water, put baby powder on it, and photographed it with little combinations of things. See, a Jewish vampire! Ha! I loved that baby powder. It was real silly stuff, like a grade-C Hollywood movie: fun but ridiculous.

I wasn't really interested in that work anymore. I was just experimenting with materials, starting to draw more, doing Kwik prints. Things were obviously getting much more intricate, painterly, and out-of-hand in a way. I was moving too fast into something that I really knew absolutely nothing about. They have a slickness that comes when you first learn something. You think you know it, but you don't really have the body, the substance behind it. You know what I mean? Like, that triptych with Ben has the whole history of our involvement behind it. Then I got to this other work. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just playing around. And in some waysI think they work because of the freedom, the freedom that ignorance gives you. But then, all of a sudden, you get to a point where . . . you are past the point of ignorance but there's nowhere to go. You know what I mean?

So, I started doing some real dumb things with color and light. They're pretty, I guess. I like looking at them. I'm interested in how other people do it. But the idea doesn't really affect me. They're boring. I'm not interested in going around, looking at the way light falls on this or that. But I was doing that kind of junk.

In 1976 I quit photography. I went back to drawing. One of my friends had always talked about drawing as mark making, and I really never understood. I never was interested in drawing as rendering, so I just tried to see what I could do making marks. I did a lot. I worked day and night just scribbling to see what happened. (Here, I can show you some.) I have tons of them. Some of them aren't very good . . . pretty awful in some ways. The more minimal ones I like a lot. It gave me a freedom that I hadn't had in a long time, too. See, the earliest ones were the best ones. Really, that's what happened! Later I got into some real mechanical things that I liked, but they were boring to do.

Anyway, at the time, 1977, Lynton Wells, a New York painter, was visiting here. Looking at his work, I realized that I could make marks with photography. I took a piece of glass, some paper, wire, chalk, the base of a lamp, an orange extension cord . . . and just started playing with them. I could use anything for making marks: the wire, for example, as line; the glass as something with depth. (I like this white, sort of cosmic dust. That's non-dairy creamer.) They started getting flatter and flatter. They got more interesting to me because there really was no space. They were flat, but there was a suggestion of space just by the use of the materials and the relationship of the shape and the form. (God, I still like some of these!)

I started drawing more. And I stopped using anything in the photographs that was identifiable as a product, like a beer can or TV. I wanted them to be more abstract. I started using parts of an old battery that I found smashed open. I used fragments of glass and plaster from my building when I was tearing out the walls. I tore up a bunch of old drawings and used some of the pieces. (I found the pieces more interesting than the drawings.) I'd drag all that stuff back to the studio, set it up on a table, and photograph down on it -- very flat and as totally abstract as possible.

See, when things are photographed there is always going to be a question about that: "What is it?" I still have that problem. People will say, "Oh, from a distance I thought it was a painting." That bothers me, and it may be a problem with the work. They're not what they are. So, I make them as abstract as possible to avoid the reference. Like, some people have suggested that I show the object and the photograph together. And I've never really wanted to do that. Somehow, the photograph still leaves a mystery about the look of the object, especially in terms of scale and space. I'm trying to create an illusion of space that doesn't really exist.

So, this is the sort of thing I've been doing since the mid-'70s. The first stage was documentary on the street, the second was autopsy and death, and now this. Even this has changed a lot as I have changed the size of the constructions and the prints, the materials, the colors. Everytime you change one thing, other things have to change in ways you couldn't anticipate. Often I've found, for example, that the objects that worked the best were not the ones that worked the best as photographs. And often the ones that worked best as photographs didn't work well as objects. For the past couple of years I've mainly been changing the constructions to see what happens.

Maybe that's why I'm ready for the Oxford thing now. I'm doing these constructions, and I'm not doing as much photography in my other work. So I feel comfortable doing something that's much straighter. Also, I've been learning a lot from doing it that has almost nothing to do with the process of making the photographs, a lot from the people. Besides, I'm tired of hitchhiking into Iowa City every time my Volvo breaks down! Ha!

One reason, too, is the technical challenge. Like, when I agreed to do that poster for the University last year, I had no idea what I was getting into. They just wanted the inside of the Arena. I thought, "They'll buy me this camera, and I'll get to watch some basketball games. I'll go out there and shoot it." But then I found out that there were all kinds of questions: How high the camera would have to be (there's no viewfinder on a panoramic camera), the speed, how to deal with the fact that the light is so bright on the floor but falls off so much at the top. There were problems with the camera. All sorts of things.

But, like I tell my students (and I always apologize for it, because it's so corny), my grandmother used to say, "If a bird doesn't jump from the branch, it will never learn to fly." Real corny, but true. If you don't take risks, you don't learn anything. I always try to jolt myself, like putting down colors that don't work and making them work.

My mother, to this day, makes comments about how I used to be as a child: real clean. She would make me little suits with my name embroidered on them. I could go out and play in the mud and never get a spot on me. Obviously, you can see by the way I look, I'm hardly that way now! And I think the work has both aspects. In some ways I'm anal compulsive, and in other ways I'm the opposite (whatever you call that). Anyway, the Oxford thing has technical challenges, too.

One of the other things about doing this project is that . . . for the last year, year and a half, I've been a little dissatisfied with the work. It has to do with social responsibility. I don't know how to get back into that. I'm not sure that I need to or that I should. What good does it do, anyway? I have questions about that. But, see, I'm 42 now. I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement as an undergraduate and then the anti-war thing as a graduate student. And now what I see is that we've gone back to before that point, because nobody is doing anything. I'm just saying I feel guilty in some ways. My work is this stuff I do in my studio in this ivory tower.

But, you know that triptych I showed you? When I first did that, I had it up in my living room, and my mother screamed, "How can you live with that everyday?! They're powerful images and wonderful and everything, but how can you live with them? How can you do them?! How can you do something so ugly? You have such a great sense of humor. Why don't I ever see it in your work?"

I didn't know how to answer her at first, but I thought about it later. I realized that we all have things we're able to do best in one way or another. I can sit around with my friends and tell jokes. As a matter of fact, that is what I would prefer. Wheras, William Wegman . . . (Do you know his work? like the photographs of his dog?) His stuff is hysterical! Wonderful. I love it! It's his vehicle for dealing with his sense of humor. Sitting around with his friends, he might be deadly serious. See?

I felt I was dealing with things I couldn't talk about. I couldn't talk about questions of life and death and all that at the time, because they were like splinters under my fingernails. So now I have this other stuff that's bothering me, and I wonder if there is a way to get at it. The Oxford thing may be a way. I don't know.

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