Judul : be the change yoga irvine
link : be the change yoga irvine
be the change yoga irvine
good evening, i'm to toby jurovic curator ofphotography. i'd like to welcome you to thesmithsonian american art museum. thank you for coming out on thisappropriately soggy day. as some of you may or may not know, the pond itself dried upseveral years after a
be the change yoga irvine , john photographed it, and i'm sure todayit's at least ankle-deep again. before we gomuch further if i could ask everybody to turn off their phones oranything else that might ring or buzz. we're here tonight
to mark two events. the first is the first exhibition of john's portfolio of the pond. the first time all these images havehave ever been exhibit together in the museum, and alsoits reissue by aperture on the a twenty-fifthanniversary up its first publication. after the show was installed, our preparator came to me and he said, "youknow, i went to look for a copy of this book on ebay and it costs about as much asa used honda civic."
i said, "rest assured,there are more on their way." so it's a real service that aperture hasreprinted this and made it available to the public again. it also, though, speaks to the iconic statusthat the pond has attained. now, at first glance for those of you whohave see the show or are familiar with the book,which we will look at shortly, it seems like an unusual suspect. as i note my introduction they're not easyphotographs to understand, and most are subject and unusually likable. flippingthrough the book,
or walking through the exhibition, wesubconsciously worry that we might ruin our shoes in all of the muck, and you kind of try to make sure you have had yourtetanus shot updated. it's a little kinda sharp outthere. but nobody has ever accused john of doing things the easy way. by thetime we reach the end of our journey, he has carefully convinced us that there'ssomething worth looking at no matter where we might find ourselves.that there's elegance and revelation to be discovered
around every corner. the pond in factreflects john's generosity as an artist. it is not simply about a place but about howwe discover it. more specifically about how johndiscovered it. from frame to frame, we duck and weaveour way through the branches at his side, pause to turn and look above ata flock of birds wheeling overhead, our focus shifts and we quickly find arock at our feet that's just about the trip us. it's like we're next to him as he'sexposing each and every frame. reading the pond engages us as deeplyand as thoughtfully
as that walk in the woods might have. now, let's see if i can turn the slide on here. the pond itself did not arise fullyformed from the muck. it draws in a tradition of narrativelandscape, one that photography is particularlyadept at. in literature, john says, "landscape inevitably becomesthe setting, the background to the story. it isn't easy to do withlanguage, but it is a natural photographic mode. inphotography it's the one place landscape can be theprimary subject."
there are few images that john and idiscussed that we wanted to show for you to keep in mind as we goalong. this is a photograph by george barnard made in 1864-1866 from photographic views of sherman'scampaign following the army of tennessee as it made itsway towards atlanta. aj russell photographed two photographs from thegreat west illustrated published in 1869 which followed the construction of theunion pacific railroad from omaha
the promontory. a narrative quiteliterally taking us right down the tracks, and then for thoseof us that i remember seeing the o'sullivan show this spring, i won't ask for ashow of hands, but i know you were all there. timothy o'sullivan's work for the kingand wheeler surveys, and as john and i were working on the show i'dspent a lot of time looking at apache lake, and i said, "oh this is, it's thesame picture isn't it." the first person who canidentify this in the pond will win a prize at the end of theevening.
this dialogue, this format of the extendedphotographic narrative returned to prominence again in the1970s in the work of lee friedlander. two images seen here from americanmonument, which is rather, both comical and grimassessment of the american social landscape between watergate, the end the vietnam war, and thebicentennial. a work of robert adams. these are two works from the new west, which had pop kind of grabbing us by the collar and shaking us, and trying to point out what had happened
to this landscape west of the missouririver in the 100 years since o'sullivan and russell had been there. a work oflewis baltz. this is from a series called the newindustrial parks in irvine california. it is 52 photographs of the side of prefabricated concrete buildings. i'm pointing out the monotony of theworld to which we had condemned ourselves. there'snowhere to go but up from here. before john joins me on stage, i'd like to thankthe generous benefactors
who donated the original addition to thepond to the museum, as well as michael abrams who added additional prints representedby the second addition to complete our portfolio. i'd also like tothank mister abrams, eddie lincoln, and stephen stein for theirsupport of tonight's event. without further delay, please join me in welcoming john gossage. now there's a cheery landscape. i'd like to welcome all of you fans of smallbodies of water tonight.
so i get off easy, you just ask me questions, right? there are questions? before we actually go too far along, let me talk about what we are looking at. yes, what we decided i mean idecided we would have behind us, run through basicallyevery page cover, front to back, of the newaddition of the pond and it will sort of run on a loop. it'll rununtil you're all so tired of it that you demand that we turn it off. just to have a general sense of the book
in this current edition, but also the factthat of my initial idea of this was for this to be a book. i was showing at leo castelli gallery at thetime when i did this and mister castelli was actually quitesurprised that i actually did not want to do a show. at that point in time, what happened with, when you did books, they often were seen as catalogues of exhibitions one of the things that i wasparticularly insistent on is i wanted
the book to function as the original. not that it precluded a show but it was a point that had to be made at that point in time, or atleast i felt it did. this really is, the firsttime i've ever seen them all together on gallery walls. it was quite a revelation for me too. you designed the book yourself? with my friend gabriela francesca gertz in berlin, yeah. can you talk alittle bit
about the cover? now this was the first book that aperture published that didn'thave an image on it, on the cover. if you get far enough along, curiousenough, or if you spill something on it, that's usually what happens, there is a photograph hidden there. one of the things that's interested me, is that in this design, its so emphatic, it's alsmost like it's yelling at you, the pond, and then you open it and it's this set of rather quiet and subtle landscapes.
what were your thoughts and the sort of dichotomy between them? the concept, i had the idea in myhead before. i wanted to cover a pastoral violence i emphatically did not wanta picture on the cover. this was, this was the days before computer design too. actually what i did, i found them theother day too, i use pressed type with a font similar to this, and sorta layed it out,and then i photographed it because there was no
press type big enough. i made numerous prints that were bigger andbigger till i could figure out how long the vest jacket had to be. it was a very, you know, battling wire and string kind of design. gabriella, who was at that point a designstudent in berlin, who now has her own designworkshop and is the head professor at
kassel germany of the whole designdepartment, help me walk through all those intricacies. i didn't wantone picture singled out as the key picture, because it is a narrative. if you make too much of a point of a single image in a narrative from theoutset everything revolves around that. try to figure out whereit's supposed to fit in. yeah, and it becomes the focal ofeverything. the title was enough. the title, you are going to look for a pond. you've given them enough of a hint. yeah, exactly.
let's actually skip ahead and talk about that a littlebit. the pond. yeah. and the cover to the book, which we will get to eventually. is a reproduction of a page from my copy of theroux's walden. every word crossed out except the pond. yeah. where do you see is the link between these twoplaces or why was that so important?
one easy thing is i cameto washington to go to ford foundation supported specialschool called walden school. you go to walden school, you readthe pond, you read theroux, you know. i'd obviously read the book, butthat wasn't the particularity of it. i wanted to dosomething with an east coast landscape. most the, a number the sources you've shown, my friends, i mean, the thing that's hard to,
even for me to recapture is back then. to understand, youhave two, i'm talking about two people here,almost. there's john gossage twenty-five years ago, and my a sense of what i was interestedin and who i was, and that's less certain given i've forgotten certain things, probably exaggerate others, and then there's me,
here now. but as i remember it, one of the things that most fascinated meabout theroux's walden is that he had obviously lived, it was the recounting of anexperience. he had factual information. he'dlived this life, it's not proposed at least to be a work of fiction at all. so specifics lead to a book that had literally become mythological you will, aboutamerican,
american reality, its relationship tonature. i wanted to then take that myth, and make it factual again, and see what you found if you "retraced the specificity of that book." what mythology then became something youcould live with in these, you know. do you knowwhen walden was published? i don't, i know someone in the audience who does. i just saw him. what year was it published?
1856. thank you. you know, so basically we are looking at youknow a hundred and you know thirty years, or something likethat in between. the experience has changed. it also wasn'tthe same story that i wanted to know. i was confident that i would not beretelling the same story, because of how thingshad changed. i think one thing that was actuallypointed out by friend, read the text in the catalogue and in the exhibitions and said,
"walden wasn't a wilderness at the time." but i think it has in our, sort of, collective memory become this symbol. it couldn't be quoted more frequently by the sierra club, the wilderness society. we have this idea of it as this sort of retreat from from nature. pardon me, retreat innature. we also, i don't know how many ofus have been to walden, but i think everybody has thisidea in their head when you say it. one of the funny things about doing this, the firstquestion everybody has is:
so, where's this pond? everybody wantsto know where it is. i actually, i had a couple media request to be taken out and given atour of the pond. guys, it was 25 years ago. did you think about just taking them to a different pond? i was actually thinking about sortof filling something in rock creek next to my place with sort of a hole. so i can just sort of point into it. don't wonder too far. photographs lie, it's just smaller than i imagined.
it's just my craft andcleverness as a photographic artist. before photoshop. well, one thing, just to answer, one thing i did do before, i did go towalden. you know, to the pond, not to the school. i reread the book, sort of close read it, you know, knowing i was going to cited it in the arched way that i did. i didn't want to make a fool of myself, which i may have done anyway.
one of the things that was appealing to me, was that it was not so far into the wilderness, even back then.it was, it was just at at a distance that produced a change fromthe city. that's one of the things iwant it to happen with this, too. i didn't want something so far away that it was an experience of truly going into the wilderness, going into the shenandoah forest. being a new york boy that sort of scared meanyway.
but you also, you deliberately didn't pick a place that peoplewould necessarily want to go to. why? why? i had the tours all ready. it's a package deal, you get a print and a tour with this. but it's not an easily appealing landscape. there's a, kind of, implied thread in some of the pictures and the sort of broken tree.
one of the things about this, i do find all these things i photographed, in the way i photographed them to be beautiful. that's a broad use of that word. that's why photographers photograph. i found them valuable and worth saving and bringing home with me. that's why wemake pictures. what you're looking for, for yourself, is some kind of educationalhonesty.
i can live with this view from my experience lived up to this point. those are the places that i'm lookingfor. places that i can say this is not a special case, this has to do with the life i've lived. i mean, i was born and partially raised in staten island, new york,which is the part of new york city that has the most of this kind of area. we would play, wheni was a kid, in
the sort of areas that would later becomeshopping centers, but were sort of semi swampy and everything. we'd have ourlittle forts and all these things. not that muchdifferent then the things that i saw go on around thepond. it was an experience that felt truthful to me, and not overly romantic. it had a familiarity? yeah.when we were talking yesterday, the one of the thingsabout this project has been your book, looking back at the work again,and you're looking back at
who you were 25 years ago. this is maybe an unfair question. what did you learn as you were making the photographs for the book? obviously, as you just said, there was a,you pick the place that that you were certainly comfortable. how did that change between the beginning and the end of the project? also, i think, picture to understand how the project, it's easy to look back and saywell i had the project, and i did the project. it didn't work like that atall.
i went out to make some pictures, and i had more than an inkling that photographic books were actuallythe major leagues of the media. exhibitions were nice, i was with very goodgalleries, good museums for collecting my work. but, my interest primarily was this understanding that i got from, particularly, sort of, hanging around the new york scene and people like warhol the photographers of the time, and artists of the time. the artist's responsibility
was to make the work. then set the context for which thework would be seen. photographic books seemed the absolute perfect medium for that. that's how i got involved with photography. i mean, i was a kind of young photographer that ranthrough the show's to the bookstore to see if there was acatalogue. what i was doing, i had theidea that i wanted to do a book. i had no idea what that book should be.it's not just the photograph of john gossage, because
that's a really retrograde, conceptualframework. authorship is you know, so what, we're all somebody.so i found some pictures, and i found this pond driving between theuniversity of maryland where i was head of the graduate department in photography, andmy home. i had a particularly relaxed schedule in maryland. i came in one day a week and taught. not too stressful. yeah, a class and didn't have to go to faculty meetings. what did i know? i found this place, and i thought, "there are a lot of pictures that i couldmake
around this." as i started to make, i started getting the concept. it's a pond. the world and things didn't come into it at all, but i had a sort of handful of pictures and i thought this haspossibilities. now, let's see where it leads me. to this day, i'm the absolute inverse of a conceptualist. lewis baltz, who is my dear friend, and has been for many many years. lewis gets a very specificconcept and illustrates it. lewis is insistent
where i'm expansive, in equal measure. that's why we get along so well. this taught me what was was possible within a book. all of a sudden, it wasn't others books, it was mine. what can iadd, too? even at that point, a lot of books had been done, and you don'twant to replicate other people's achievements. it's not particularly interesting, and it's not productive.
i had the, also initial, inclination i wanted to be involved in allsteps of the process. which was not common, at the time. but that seemed to be something i wanted totry to take on even if i failed. one thing that we talked about, you said that on the one hand, you don't have this kind of rigorous sort of conceptual framework when you begin, but you said as you were making the trips for this book, you made sure you never made a picture from the same place
twice. that there was this kind of effort to, each time you took the camera out, in essence, was a new opportunity to discover the same place again. yeah. at the base of it, i'm just trying to figure out away to make good pictures, you know. whatever works. you know, stand on one leg, fine. what, and then the definition, becauseall of a sudden the other thing, it was liberating because iwas liberated from the medium in a funny way.
in the 70s and 80s photography was coming on big-time. everybody wanted to dosomething about photography. the museums were doing things, the field wasbeing solidified, and you reacted inside the field. mypictures were showing up in group exhibitions on all sorts of different themes, some, you know,history of photography things would be at the end of contemporary work, and its sort of was, you are connected with those concerns.one of the things about the book is that it liberates you from that.
all of a sudden, you're inventing the wholeworld in which these things exist. it was liberating, but it was also terrifying. now there are no rules. now, it's whatever works, and you have to besure that it works. how do you? i've always kept my own counsel on these things. i think that's important. i think, it's not something youask others about too much. one thing about also doing this as a book and not as an exhibition, is that it does give you that control. one of the things about seeing the show upstairs is that you can walk in
from the last gallery and you can look at the entire thing backwards, and you might be halfway throughbefore you figure that out, or it might not occur to you. how does that change? short of taking this iscutting out the binding, people have to look at this in the sequence that you intend. i don't think, one of the things i'm really against souvenirs. one way or theother this show was and is a differentexperience, and so it should be.
the insisting on narrative, because, i mean, what happens withbooks? book 101. photobook 101, very simple. simple layout too, you know, single picture white page. this, you see, this picture, assuming you'renot thumbing from the back. people who thumb from the back get theirhands slapped by me. so you really are controling how you read the book. oh yeah, but i'm notheavily armed. you see this picture?
it passes into memory and it affects howyou see this picture. that's accumulative affect, that means that this picture all away at the end has a very very different context for itthen the one's at the start. if you are going to do a book, you have to take it seriously, because it's going tohappen. we rely on a literary model, it's not exactly ours. books have been formulated this waybecause of narrative literature.
you start at page one, you reach your waythrough the book. photobooks don't necessarilyalways demand that but we fall back on it. it's a veryvery powerful directional force. so let's try to use it if you possibly can. i learned that fromwalker evans american photographs which is the first book i ever saw that actually figure that out. we started by looking at acouple nineteenth century photographs. i think that something thatcurator's
commonly do is we sit around in our office and stare at things and assume that artists spent as much time going, you know, sort of, going back through the canthinking about all of this, and this picture must be linked to this picture. it was interesting, i was recently talking to robert adams about how influencial o'sullivan had been to him, and he said, i looked at thosephotographs once in a cardboard box in the denver public library 40 years ago, i haven't seen them since.
how familiar were you with, i mean, we talked about the apache lake photograph by o'sullivan. how conscious were you of these? there are these very strongreferences. well i'm different than a lot of photographers.i mean, when i was 14 and 15, instead of going to school a lot ofdays i went through every picture in the museum of modern art permanentcollection. i can remember them in order.
i did this later. i did this trick for john szarkowski for a photograph he insisted was not in the collection. i told him what box it was in. he was very happy about that. i always thought that i neededto know the history the medium that i was working in, which was not readily accessible when i waslearning. since, i've, you know, i've helped a few peopleassemble some collections of photographs. so the o'sullivan picture of the lake.
apache lake? apache lake. i actually helped actually the deal was, i just remembered, the deal was with the library of congress who had duplicates, and they trade, i traded a couple my prints for o'sullivan prints that my friend wanted to buy. hepaid me for my photographs and he got those. then i got paid forthe deal by owning that one picture of therock in the cup. this is the part where we turn the recording off. yeah, i've forgotten how i did that.
photography, even this kind of photography, it'sthrough, nothing is particularly moving. i can't work with tripods, so this is all hand camera. as soon as i set up a tripod, ican't figure out why i've set up the tripod, and what i was looking at. it's all instantaneous, one wayor another. it hits me. the learning of the history is, sort of, like honing your instincts. but i don't think about any of that when i'm, when i'm actually makingpictures, really. it just sort of
happens or it doesn't. i did like that the one picture i put in the pond thatabsolutely referenced o'sullivan, i saw it and iknew what it referenced. oh, it's timothy o'sullivan pictures that's sitting on my wall, i'll take a a picture of that, and i will, i'll find away to get it into the book. that was sort of the fun part of it. when we get there, just shout out. this actually brings something up. three of the photographs. there it is! yeah.
coke can, same coke can. the previous photograph with theferris wheel three of the photographs in the book were not made in maryland. no more then that. more then that? how many? three were made in berlin, one was made in long island. yeah the other ones are in maryland, one's in chevy chase actually. i got it wrong. i guessed it was the picture with the
ferris wheel, but you don't. in the first edition of the book, you never revealed this. it's only in jerry bager's essay in the reprint. what was it about those picturesthat you felt was so important that they had to be. well, i got a revelation abouthalfway through the project. one, i was not interested in the documentary function. staten island, right? no, long isand. oh, ok. i had a number of thingsfrom
off of queen's chapel road, queenstownmaryland. by the way, total aside. this has nothing to do with this. queenstown shopping center had the most amazing thing when i wasthere. they had the soap opera cafe. if you went in at lunch and got a sandwich, they would perform an ongoing soap opera live for you. itgot me in the mood to make pictures. i mean, it was one of the most amazing little events. you just, sat there with your mouth open. it has nothing to do with this, but the idea that
and it hit me that i can remember sittingthere and getting it. oh, it's all fiction. it all is anyway. i mean, one picture in american photograph'sby walker evans is made in cuba. at least, if not more. it's the world in between thecovers that matters. it has to be plausible, it has to function in the way that you want. by the way, i left all that information out. my sense of the two editions
particularly was the first edition it was there to be an enigmaticpresence. a good friend of mine bill enlisten and i were talking around this time, a little earlier. bill'swork at the museum of modern art was being reviled by everyone. we, sort of, got this thing that we were basicallymaking time bombs. that you just laid it out there and you put the timer on it, and it was going to explode on him one day. it was just going to sit there, and lurk thereuntil people got it. i was really happy for the book to just have this,
be this presence, and you know, it worked. i mean, who knew? it just slowly built. this edition examines the book as well as being the book. therewas, you know, a different kind of essay inthe original one, that's taken out of this. there are two essays that examine, basically look at the book's naval, if you will. which i didn't want in the first one.i didn't want comments, kind comments by esteemed friends. now it's the time to be analyticalabout the book.
although i do have the confidence thatmost of the people will get the book for the first time. i'm sorry, i think, we will read the essay for an awfully long time. they will get the book anyway until they have readthe essay, and maybe they'll never read the essay. it does happen, yeah, it's shameful isn't it? it's our school systems. one of the things in looking at the other
images that we showed, robert adams, and baltz lee freeman, and also frank gohlke and you really, kind of reinvented the way photographs were printed in the 70s. that the language real changed. i think what most audiences were used to looking at was an ansel adam's. you have a black black and white white. in this nice kind of, you know, we can find every zone 1-10 represented in there and even in photographers like minor white or paul kapine grew up in making
landscape photographs after that, and you guystook that tonal range and kind of pressed it all towards this high end. well, the zone system is the most perverse system. i mean, it basically all it does is allow you, the zone system is ansel adams' systems for exposure, by the way. so you'd get the most tone out of what the film gave you. what we were clearly about was not making of operatic kind of prints, we were interested in reproducing experience.
there wasn't any technical rebellion as much as, i mean, ansel's pictures don't look like anywhere anyone's ever beenexcept, you know, the the sets behind metropolitan opera. it wasn't real. we couldn't, it was the 70s, we wantedeverything to be really real man. your hair was longer, too. that was something that frank gohlke recently said. he said, "i wanted to make pictures that looklike they were hard and bright and sharp
because that's what we thought america looked like in the 70s." exactly. you know, it was trying to find somethingtranslated to black and white for most of us, that seemed authentic. there were no rules for how oneprinted that. one thing about thephotography that exploded in the 70's was the sensethat there were no rules that you had to applying anymore.
the sons and daughters of ansel adamsweren't the ones that hit prominence, it waseveryone else that had that come before them. so you know, and for the first time aserious look at history, too. people did look at ansel, they looked at edward weston, that lead to ansel and everything. at this historical moment, we are kind of approachingthe end gelatin silver printing. yeah, probably. it's whenever the paper runs out, which is five years.
how does that make you feel? that this is something that's going to disappear withinyour lifetime as an artist? well, no i feel i'm running out in about five years anyway. no, i mean one of the thingsthat's actually interesting irony to me is the same virtually the same day this came outofficially a book i did with gerhard steidl '32 inchruler map a babylon' came out, which is my otherwashington book on kalorama. where i live, and it's all digital color,
because that's what that project needed. it's really interesting to me, you know, istill i shoot black-and-white film because ican get more out of that that then i can get out of black-and-white digital. for the first time, ii mean, i always hated film color, because to formulate a color film youhad to decide as a manufacturer on a very narrow color space and it was never the way i saw things. it never seemed real. now, i can shoot raw files and process them to the way i see color. it's not that ones has replaced the other, it's added onto it.
i mean, i really don't care abouttools. i care about vision. when we weretalking about this earlier you also said that one of the things that's changed, is that with digital printing nothing's beingmade by hand anymore. most artists aren't making their own prints. you're not going, you know, if you or bob, or lee go into a dark room with a negative on a piece a paper, you all come out with somethingwithin, sort of, the same range, but very different. now as we have talked about it,
in part because of the cost of the technologiesand also the complexity that people are relying on going to service, or working with a printer. how has that changed? i always felt that the jobdescription is that i do everything. i've tried assistants and people who have wanted to do, you know, internship i never know what todo with them. just sit and spot all my prints and get my dry cleaning. i'm really, you know, awful. i am, i like them. i end up liking them, so i can't do that stuff. i think the idea is that
i do all, i'm lucky to this point that i actually canafford to have all the big digital printerand everything, and i tweak everything. my digital prints don't look like other people's digital prints. i've never done well withlabs, they're just sort of halfway there as far as i'm concerned. i'm probably the worst client a lab could ever have because it's never right. i don't go there and, you know, abuse them andhave them abuse me back. i'm going to ask one more question, and then open it up to
the audience. but you left out all the embarrassing ones that we talked about? you can ask me later. you drew a distinction between yourwork and robert adam's particularily in the new west. you said, "your work has no message for change." i'm not quite sure i believe it. i don't have any faith that temporary art produces social change,
in a direct way. broadly, very broadly too, the fact that and individual voice by a singleindividual and their view of the world can be heard in a non mitigated way in the mediumin which they feel at least they can speak eloquently,is a rare opportunity. i have had a wonderful life doing this. this is exceptional be able to be allowed to do such a thing. especially being in a town
of really professional politics. i've seen what job description that is, and i'd never ever do it in my entire life. it's a real profession, to thinkthis thing is going to make global warming go away seems more than absurd, it seems pathetic. i want to produce art, and the thrill that a reviewer gets about seeing somethingthat's revelatory to them. at least in a minor way. personally, it's a one to one thing. i'm not talking to groups,large group and individual.
i'm talking to each viewer. you ever think about this. it's a lap medium. it's you and it. it's this distance. what can be moreintimate then getting to sit in 2000 people's laps? every photograph by definition is previous and elsewhere. that's what it is. you're not here, andyou're not when the picture got made. that just implies that a certain trick isbeing pulled.
that you're allowing to be pulled on you. you're a willing participant in this. the facts, to decide to be documentary is a conceit for me, because just the frame, what's over there, what's over there, what's behind me? if i record absolutely all of that it actually is fairly boring. generalizedexperience without a particular
sensibility, and not being able to be presentthere is a very, sort of, thin experience. what, i think, what i want from a work ofart is i want a feeling that i can standthere. a photographic work of art, let's put it, i can stand there give myself over to the experience, and get a particular insight that iwould not have had probably if i was standing there.
how documentary are diane arbus' photographsof those people? they are absolutely specific. they're lookingstraight at you, and that moment was a hundred andtwenty-fifth of a second. i've actually watched her photograph, and i saw the moment that she took ofthis woman and i realized oh, yeah i saw it go by, and itwas in, it was a flicker. it was an incrediblyintense moment i'm sure in the picture. that's the kind of fiction, it's not thefiction that implies a lie. it's a fiction that describes theexperience you're getting
is fleeting, transitory, and at the same time permanent, and will bethere when you go back again. it's not reality, in the normal way that we navigate it. i did not have to go to the pond forevery picture. when pictures that came in berlin lookedback at me and said ah, that's perfect, that's an added dimension to this experience that's happening within the book. nobody cares about the pond,
itself. it actually still is there. they built a metro over it, but it's still there. but i'm not making a case thatthis is the a place that you should visit. that's why i didn't want to take, you know,newspaper people there. it's not about that, it's not asite-specific piece. the whole concept of narrativelandscape, i almost, it seemed to me, at least, i almostinvented with this. my sense that i had to,
i should reiterated it, to keep you moving along. we are moving from here to there. i mean, the book is about steppingoff the pavement onto something, in this case, or you can say this, it isn't pavement. youtake a walk and you wind up back home - very, verysimple. the paths, the paths where the things that i was walking on to take pictures often. especially in this kind of, you know, urban wilderness. there are lots of paths, they are well trodden. they seemed to offer pictureopportunities,
and they offer the literature that i wanted to deal with in this. you walkthe path, you get to something. let's take apicture of that. let's go on the path again and we get to something else. it implies movement, you know, photography is a broad field. i'm an artist, you know. basically i show in galleries and museums, and i make books that or sold generally to people interested contemporary art. the journalistic photographers who have a certain
other belief of what they're doing and are very committed to doing it. i'm notinvolved with that. my sense is, my dear friend robert adams who we've talked about here, is very, very concerned about certain issues. he did a book recently about clear-cutting of the forests in bay city, you know, the ancient, first cut forest in
the northwest. inwashington and oregon. washington and oregon. he, you know, he very much wanted that book to be a changing element directly in thespecific issues. i guess i'm just more cynical about it. i live in this town,i've met over the years a lot of politicians, enough that in the first twenty yearsi never voted, because i had met them. i mellowed out.
i don't see it as, in the fieldi'm in, an it engine of direct change. we as artists make objects of fascination. in other words, there's a sense that iwould like why do a book, or why there's a show. i want you to return to these things. they can be a touchdown for personalbeliefs and personal actions in the political realm. i'm absolutely fine with that, you know,like that's
an individual's right. that reaffirms, but it tends not to changeyour mind as much as reaffirm beliefs you already have. if we are really honest about it all.we are, sort of, you know, talking to the choir if you will. it's just, it's a matter of intention nota matter of the affect. if i intended things to change directly, i don't think i've ever made a decentphotograph for that. i don't
think i know how. i don't tend to like to go to places tophotograph where people have automatic weapons. you know, i've been to a couple, and it made me very uncomfortable. it's just, you know, cowardice. i just don't have a sense that we affect things that muchin the field still photography anymore. television doesn, i mean, you know, there are examples of shooting a famine in africa that producedan outpouring of aide,
seeing the tsunami. that's where, if iwanted images to change things, i would be atelevision cameraman. at this point, that's the greatest number ofpeople, immediate action-reaction. i mean, it took me years to get thisbook out. by the way, the first edition to the book was so popular that i did one booksigning in new york where one person came. i think, we can get you two tonight, john. i did a second book signing though where at least a hundred came. but richard avedon was was sitting next to me
signing books, and they took pitty on me. john, thank you very much. thank you, thank you for coming.
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