Artist Statement
I began making “urban landscapes” with a medium-format Holga---a $17 toy camera---in September of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. My heart was shattered then, and my career was momentarily ruined. In that upside-down time, I truly had nothing better to do than walk all day, every day, in Los Angeles’ many strange neighborhoods, shooting with a camera that couldn’t see straight.
The Holga’s many laughable failures are well known and all-encompassing: focus, exposure and parallax are effectively un-controllable, and the plastic lens is always aberrant, cloudy and vignetted. Much to my surprise, however, the freaky results of that technical dysfunction resembled precisely the pictures I’d been dreaming of in those nightmare days.
By obliterating the hyper-detailed, documentary specificity that modern multi-coated lenses have made commonplace, the Holga’s bizarre optics have given me access to a realm of richly-textured suggestion, impression and allusion that I couldn’t achieve in my earlier attempts at the lyrical landscape, which now seem banal and psychologically barren by comparison.
As I’ve broadened the scope of this project over the last ten years, many other American cities have drawn my attention: I’ve made repeated visits to San Francisco, Washington DC, New Orleans and Las Vegas, and over 20 trips to New York City, to photograph its neighborhoods, streetcorners, landmarks and waterfronts.
Process Statement
The images in this project are shot on medium format black-and-white negative materials, scanned and printed digitally, using archival pigment inks. The standard image size for these prints is 20x19.5”, on 24x24” paper.
