[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] he knew he was born in the Bronx in New York on the eve of the Second World War he was one of the very first photographers to use color at a time when black and white was the only photography taken seriously code became a classic her photography he already came to her at least his photographs were already shown in the 70s here in this amphitheater and to get me I would not used to give a big welcome the big immense Joelle Meredith no don't go away yet thank you thank you everybody but I want to thank you personally in front of everyone Sam curated the show that I have a tall recall and he showed me photographs that I hadn't considered in the past and I think it's a beautiful show funny and provocative extreme in some way so congratulations thank you for doing that thank you for me and he puts this all together and he has an incredible staff of people who work behind the scenes and never get thanked but they deserve incredible gratitude from all of us from the participants and from the attendees I also want to thank Howard Greenberg my gallerist from New York who work together with Sam and help provide the pictures I'd like to thank the Polka gallery family and the fondest young Roederer for being supportive of the festival and my work so could those lights come down a little bit so I could see the people here yeah you can see me right and I'm not so important it's the pictures that will tell the story so what do I have to tell you I come as a voice from 55 years away if when I started I looked about 50 years at J would still be alive so I'm a vestige of an of a past time but that time was an innocent time photography wasn't considered a serious art form it was thought of more as a craft or something utilitarian it took pictures of weddings and funerals and holiday celebrations but it wasn't really raised up as an art form and in 1962 I was 24 years old and I was a young art director in a small advertising agency in New York and I witnessed someone make photographs a little project I did and the way Robert Frank photographed so excited me it I knew nothing about photography and nothing about Robert Frank but it showed me or at least that's how I misinterpreted it it showed me that time and movement or some things that could be stopped by a camera a frozen moment of perception something that you see that is so fleeting and disappearing but you can hold on to it you can tear that little piece of time out of the flow of time and that excited man I thought I want to do that I want to go out in the streets and look at the world and see what is it in the world that speaks to me can I find my identity because I didn't know who I was I was a 24 year old kid from New York oh by the way I'm gonna be speaking in English just we disobey my day pal I'll say excuse me more but you can understand English yes okay then I'll speak it New York style I had been a painter at that moment abstract expression is sort of moving into a kind of hard-edged abstraction but when I saw photography I thought this was a modern instrument for making art a machine the same machine that all of you use and what's fascinating about photography to me maybe it is to you too is that we all use the same format more or less a little rectangle and yet we fill it every one of us with a different kind of energy a different idea about what makes sense to us and in that way photography is the universal language we all speak this language now anyone with a cell phone in the farthest reaches of China Mongolia can take a photograph that's different from making a photograph taking a photograph is nothing making a photograph requires a kind of intelligence and passion it requires thinking because photography although it looks like it's pictures is about ideas if you have ideas you might be able to frame your ideas in a consistent way so that over time you start to make sense to yourself and maybe to others as well because isn't that the magic of photography it used to be that magic was watching a piece of paper and in some developer bring an image up and and that was magic any photographer here who's done that knows how magical that is but think about this you make a photograph of a moment of understanding and then you send that photograph out into the world and people thousands of miles away hold your image in their hands and they read your thoughts and your feelings your intuitions the impressions that the world makes on you that's magic that you can carry your impressions and send it through the ether to other people to read or understand that's special and photography is our lingua franca now so how how do you establish your identity we each have a fingerprint that identifies us but I think we also have a way of seeing that identifies us at least that's what I've been searching for for 55 years how how can I describe the world that I see in front of me and I think that I've learned everything I know about life about myself through the agency of the of the camera and the photograph when I lift my camera up it's because something impels me something calls to me in a way that is irresistible and and I watch the world in front of me and it reveals itself in a thousandth of a second this is a special quality of photographer and if you practice photographing on the streets of big cities as I have for all of my life that quality of timing the ability to put yourself in the right place at the right moment and the things that are happening just seem to happen for you it's as if you have a sixth sense and we see this I mean you look at the photographs of Cartier Bresson or Gary Winograd or you know the whole history of photography is filled with people who have been in the right place at the right time how do they know it's because they use that instrument again and again to kind of sharpen their mental processes sharpen their appetite for life because photography every time you press that button is a yes yes to beauty yes to tragedy even yes to love and pain and anger it's like taking it all in photography takes it all in and you as a photographer you give it back in little bits and pieces and for me that was the greatest discovery that you could put photographs together page after page and have them make sense it's not cinematic and I probably if I was beginning now I would be more involved in the moving image but in my time in 1962 the camera seemed to be the appropriate instrument for modern life as as I saw it I'm going to show you a few slides now and I'll probably talk about some of them here and there otherwise we'll be here all night but you don't seem to be going anywhere right now so but we'll have some fun here okay in 1962 when I began I didn't know that black and white was considered the art form of photography so the first thing I did was buy two rolls of color film and go out on the street and start to shoot and for the first year of my working life I photographed in color and during that time I had to learn how to overcome my shyness my fear my my inability to make an interesting frame it was a learning experience and color seemed to me to be the natural choice the world is in color it made perfect sense to photograph in color but what wasn't so interesting was that everyone that I knew photographed in black-and-white so it was difficult to to show color pictures to the few friends I had who made photographs and have them accept the idea of color and yet here we are now 50 years later and color is our everyday choice for most people so in that first few months of shooting in order to train myself to be more at ease in the world I found myself photographing women because as a young man women were daunting in some way I had a very powerful mother and she scared the [ __ ] out of me a lot of times and so I I thought I have to I have to figure this out I have to learn to get close now this woman in 1963 she knew something about what was coming if you read that a camera could go through the hollow of a hollow needle that was like the pictures we just saw before part of my training in those early years was to go to the parades in New York City because in the summertime there's a parade usually every week and the parade's provided a kind of camouflage I could disappear into the crowd and learn to get close to people you know I it there's a kind of um you have to find the right distance you know how how do you know how close to get to somebody without frightening them away can you get this close and take a picture without somebody seeing you it's a trick another magic trick of photography one of the first things that happens in photography I think is the the idea of the bullseye you shoot the arrow into the center and a lot of photographs are made in the beginning by trying to get it in the center as if by doing that you will get the photograph that you want but it takes some kind of additional thinking to begin to try to make a picture about things all over the frame and that's part of growing up with a camera as you you begin to ask questions about the way photographs work how close you get how far away for something be in the center should it be all over where is the emphasis and what kind of what what does it tell you what does it give you back when you've made this photograph so the process of photography was about pushing the limits so that I wasn't hitting the bull's eye all the time and a photograph like this is uh was an effort for a young man to kind of turn away from from the central image and try to spread it out it it's exciting to do it it's a little dangerous in a way it doesn't it doesn't satisfy your right away you have to learn to be satisfied and I think part of growing up as a as an artist using a camera is you have to push your limits and find out what else satisfies you otherwise you don't grow you stay at the same plateau for a long time like that still somewhere at the middle of 1963 I looked Garry Winograd we were both guys from the Bronx he was 10 years older than me we met one day I used to see him on Fifth Avenue all the time and one day we met on the subway two guys going to the Bronx to visit their mothers how about that and and and we both recognized each other and gary said hey why don't you come to my apartment i'll show you some pictures and when I went to his apartment it was stacks of pictures each Kodak Box had 250 pictures in it and the boxes were about this high so each stack was about 1,500 photographs and Gary just handed me 215 he said here look at this and I did and as I page through these pictures I saw that you could look at a picture or 2 3 4 then go back and look at it again and see how it related to the first one and and make the connections the kind of thing that you don't do when you show slides to people you just one slide after the other and so I thought if I want to see my photographs and work with them I'm gonna have to learn to print black and white because at that time you couldn't print a color it was much too expensive and too inconsistent and impossible to do in your home darkroom and who had the money to do that anyway I was out of work ayuh quit my job so I started shooting black and white you know the world looks funny to me or it looks complicated sometimes that this picture this picture I made only a year after I began photographing and at that moment the Museum of Modern Art got a brand-new director named John Szarkowski who I think is responsible for bringing photography to the kind of level of acceptance that we have now and I show John this photograph and he put it in an exhibition his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art which was called the photographer's eye and he hung this picture right next to Robert Frank's photograph of a man with a a tuba a musical instrument and there I was hanging my photograph hanging next to my hero so you can imagine how exciting that was can you well it was one of the things about New York City is that it's so well lit at night that you could actually go down and photograph into places like Times Square at night so that the day was extended it wasn't just seven or eight hours in daylight but another three or four hours at night that's the kind of hunger that young photographers have even now III walking through the streets of all I feel the passion and commitment that so many photographers from all over the world have and it's great to be here to see your work and these venues all over town it's this this is an amazing festival and and it's a tribute to the power of photography the still image to give us such pleasure and satisfy our curiosity Xand and liberate us from our conventions and conceptions one of the things that appeals to me about photography and that is there's a few pictures later on too but there's a kind of ambiguity even though a photograph is very specific and detailed and it shows you exactly what's going on because that's all it does when you press that button it just describes what's right in front of it and yet we're never quite sure you know what's going on in this picture is there a danger here is this a little enticing pedophilia happening or is this just a little girl who's tired and cranky and someone is saying come you know let's go home or something like that so you never quite know now she doesn't have a cellphone or anything in there so she must be reading a book remember the book will say that someday remember those things used to follow mine they put photographs in them what was on her mind I think I'll just get you know sometimes there are photographs that are turning points you see something it strikes a chord in you and you respond to it but you're not certain why what it's all about and later on you see it in the darkroom or on your contact sheet and it speaks to you more powerfully than anything else and it's really saying to you come this way I've got a secret to reveal I've got something else to show you and if you accept the voice of that photograph and follow the instinct that made you make it you may then develop the next layer of your growth your intelligence your visual pursuit of the unknown it's like entering a mystery when a new photograph comes your way and I remember I I was I was in Aspen Colorado I was traveling around America in 1964 and I was at a friend's house and I remember waking up sleeping on a sleeping bag on the floor and waking up and just standing in the window and looking out and watching the curtain blow back and forth and watching that band of shadow reveal what was outside and it was like a poem it was just blowing back and forth and I stood there transfixed couldn't like that I thought a stupid-looking in the early in the morning but I always had the camera right next to me so I I made a photograph of it thinking that it looked beautiful to me and part of what is so fascinating about this medium of photography is that each of us identifies what is beautiful to us or meaningful to us we have a way then of sharing that with everyone else that looks at your photographs but you have to believe that it is important enough to you to commit to making the photograph to accepting it as a new form of beauty this is like a classic American ad for real estate it's a corner house it's got everything you know two-car garage the fencing around it and the mother and child are sitting outside bored to tears wondering what's going on with their lives that's what it looked like to me I have no idea if that was it at all but it looked like that to me and so if you can see that and you can say something about it then maybe that's what the picture communicates you can get anything in America just go to the freezer take out I think you have to have a little sense of humor as a photographer because because the world is so crazy it's always offering up unexpected pleasures visual pleasure unlike I like all the proscenium zin this picture that that puppet theater the the arched doorway the the screen the picture on the screen even that little circular mirror up there there's like this little nothing room in a in a tract house in Jersey offered up a kind of moment of magic why walk if you can be carried why should my dog touch the dirty streets of New York why should anyone in Paris help that person who fell on the ground there so in 1966 I made some money in advertising that way I supported myself because let me tell you there was no way to sell your photographs in New York City in the 60s I once saw an exhibition of Ansel Adams the great American master photographer and he was having a show in a Chinese Laundry below street level in Greenwich Village the space was I don't know probably three and a half meters wide by five meters long and there was Ansel Adams photographs and they were $25 each and nobody bought them that's how much they loved its photography in the sixties so there was no hope whatsoever of making a living as an artist photographer if you made photographs you did it for love love of the medium love of the surprises that came with it love of talking about it with your closest friends this was a kind of a passion that I think is rare because now we have the explosion of photography and the popularity of photography and and back then there was no competition between photographers we were all in it for the same reason we love the game of seeing very special because you know now everybody comes with the camera and they want that show at the Museum or at the gallery or you know they want the big sales at the Basel Art Fair I mean it's it's it's in our time and I'm you know there's no way of turning it back and I wouldn't turn it back I make a living this way but then then it wasn't very hard to sell a photograph so I most of the photographer's I knew Robert Frank Gehry Winograd Lea Friedlander they all made a living in advertising or the record business or fashion something like that so I made some money shooting a commercial ad campaign and I immediately took that money and I went to Europe I came here for a year I lived in Spain for six months with gypsies I traveled all over Europe I shot six hundred rolls of film or or less more actually half in colour and half of black and white and and some of the best work I did was in France it was although this is bane but but you know I there was something about being here that taught me something so I owe a lot to that year in Europe I think this is another one of those examples of something being ambiguous I don't know what's going on here there's no story or anything but when I look at it I have this you know a sense that there's something something of some power some meaning to it and yet it's this nothing going on and that's when photography can really give you a fresh a fresh way of looking at your own work I think you could see in a lot of my photograph that timing you know that that instantaneous observation of some humorous moment or some moment where things are in transition it's a very appealing thing to reach for with a camera it's like a gut reaction to it and do that enough and the world becomes sharper to you you begin to see more you can identify things at different levels all at once we human beings have an incredible capacity to see all the way out here I mean really what I'm when I look at you and I do this I can see my fingers wiggling right here so we can see it almost almost a hundred and eighty degrees that's how the human human race has survived millions of years because we our instincts are great and photography uses those primitive instincts in a modern way this is a fairly ordinary postcard a picture I think but it meant a lot to me it was in its outside of Paris and Versailles and I Rea need a nothing going on really but I felt compelled by the quality of the stage set that this place looked like and I also realized when I saw the film when I finally was back in New York that that little piece of Kodachrome which is this big actually rendered every brick in the in the chimneys and every slate in the roof tiles and I thought I want to print large photographs I want to be able to see everything I don't want to just make these little prints anymore and I want to do it in color and this picture years later led me to working with the large format view camera and a big change in my life so sometimes one photograph puts a key in your mind and just turns it until you hear it all click into place so I think turning point pictures are important to hold on to I was lucky on that day to find the only three armed and cinematographer in Paris sometimes the tiniest detail sets you to seeing in some way I remember seeing this half man seated at the edge of the sidewalk and this little boy coming over and pouring water for him to wash his hands and the thing that I saw was the way the little boy's knees were locked together so that he could be as still as possible when he poured that stream on the man's hands and I thought it was such an act of respect and care so as not to soil his his jacket and and to make a photograph out of the smallest observation is sometimes incredibly rewarding and I am for me this is one of those pictures that I every time I see it I'm reminded of a kind of humanity and dignity that that little boy in a Turkish town far from anywhere was able to convey to that man that's that's beauty during my time in Europe I drove everywhere and I always carried the camera on my lap and I photographed while I was driving one because it was a challenge interesting challenge too because when you're inside your car the car is a camera and the window is your lens and you see the world coming by you like up like it's on a screen on a movie screen and three if you stop the car when you saw something by the time you got out it would be gone so photographing it on the fly that way was very important to me and I made probably four thousand pictures out the window over the course of a year and when I returned to New York John Chow Kowski at MoMA gave me a one-man show of these pictures because he felt that it was an early form of conceptual photography because I did it as a practice every day wherever I drove I carried the camera but that it had a lot of risk involved in it and and I'm you know I'm grateful for him for recognizing that because I I knew that I knew that it was risky and I knew that it was marginal like I might not get very interesting pictures most of the time things being so far away and going at a hundred kilometers an hour you know what what can you see but the camera does it the camera is an incredible tool to have for holding on to these disappearing moments he did say to me John said this is the last necessary photograph of shart okay you're ready for a surprise maybe not so big to you but was big to me because color photography was so important to me I was trying to understand why color and so for a period of a few years I carried two Leica cameras around one with Kodachrome and one with Triax each with a 35 millimeter lens on it and whenever there was an opportunity to make a pair of pictures I tried to do it and you know each picture isn't exactly the same it's slightly different but it gave me the opportunity later on to compare the two and ask myself what's more important to me what tells me everything I want to know about the world and it was color for me and a few years after doing this I stopped shooting black-and-white altogether probably 10 years of black-and-white was all I ever did but I made many of these tears and just recently we've gone through the archive in New York and we found a hundred and thirty more or less pairs of pictures which were now assembling as a book my favorite part is where the ring-toss is in the shadow oh and then they forget that forget that my favorite part is if you look at the underside of the blend of the blimp I almost said the blintze if you look at the underside of the blintze in the black-and-white pictures just gray but if you look at the color picture it's green underneath there it's that the ocean has cast its color up to the reflective underside of the blimp and for me that little detail is like a little musical note that almost is lost in an orchestral piece but you hear that little theme and and that's what color photography can do it gives you back the fact that he's on a green rooftop and not a grey rooftop and there's a you know a silver balloon with a green bottom on it it's it's rich with information this is the euro area in Paris anybody recognize something here what was that Robert Frank yeah and so on a hitchhiking trip from New York City to New Orleans having only seen Roberts book a few months before to my surprise when I was standing in the street in New Orleans the trolley came by and I saw the robert frank like image but i was shocked that the trolley was actually those colors so something something happened for me you know it was like I got a jolt that the black-and-white photograph which I believed was the reality turned out to be something different so it it prompted me to continue doing this kind of photography I feel the same way I'm pissed off I'm ready to go take me for a walk I have to pee that's what the dog is saying I could hear him clearly which one do you like better yeah okay so I got to move this along everybody when I came back from from Europe I I was awarded a Guggenheim grant because America at that point was embroiled in the Vietnam War thank you very much France for giving that to us if you remember and and and I I was awarded the grant to travel around America and look at the way Americans were spending their leisure time leisure time was a new concept it's when America had a middle class and they they retired because I had money in the bank and and they nobody seemed to you know in the in the Midlands of America next there nobody seemed to be paying attention to the Vietnam War what was going on I was trying to photograph that attitude in America so I traveled all over the country looking at the way people played and did their leisure lives while a war was going on killing 50,000 American soldiers for me it was a very important body of work that I did and hopefully someday I'll get published I remember I took it to a publisher in New York aperture press and and the head of the the company then held on to the book for two years and I finally went back and said okay give give me my book back you're not you're not gonna publish it he said I I can't publish it he said it's too tough and he said besides there's only 3,000 people in the world in the world that by photobooks he said we'll never make our money back and then he said if robert frank came to me today with the americans i couldn't publish it Wow things are I mean a worthy book should be published but apparently not that kid's gonna need a therapist I can promise you doesn't that satisfy the expression mixed message oh and in this book about America I tried to insert every seven or eight pictures something of a kind of war footing rockets that were at the crossroads of towns or launchings of battleships with the anchor made out of roses or carnations I I wanted to keep that that level of desperation and violence in the American system and I saw America just as in this photograph I saw America as falling apart in some way and you know to see to see these two women reading that little piece of grass along the highway while their house is falling down behind them is to me is like a kind of madness American madness somewhere around 1971 or two I decided to try to move away from the captured incident something like this I felt that the the incident the funny things you see on the street when they become the central point of the photograph it's as if you're only telling a joke or a little story and I wanted to see if it was possible to move away and make pictures about everything in the space from near to far all around I wanted to try to make a more complex photograph not dependent upon the hook of a funny incident or an interaction and it's a difficult thing to give up the the game the thing that you've learned how to do for a long time but when you've mastered something it's important to let go of it it's the only way to grow as an artist so I started to make pictures in which I tried to empty the middle of content I tried to push things to the side turning away from things that were too attractive or too seductive I wanted to see if I could make more complex convoluted pictures and still make them interesting and right around this time of this photograph I I felt that I was at a place where I needed something more 35-millimeter was great it had great definition but if I wanted to make big prints I needed to push myself beyond the thirty five-millimeter to a large format camera so I went and I bought an 8 by 10 inch 20 by 25 centimeter view camera and started making pictures that took a different kind of time they weren't they weren't instantaneous pictures like you make on the street they were about light and space and color and depth and and they were much slower it was as if I had two languages suddenly the kind of riffey bebop jazz of the street and and the kind of classical temple of the large-format camera and it was a rich education for me to leave behind not totally but for a period the thing that I learned to do best one of the first things that showed itself to me with a large format camera was that time wasn't instantaneous a thousandth of a second but time was many seconds or even minutes long and that you could look into the darkness at the end of the day Ultra chenille ooh that period where oncoming darkness gives you information and so I started to make pictures that had those qualities in them pools by the sea seemed to me to be the perfect measure of an torsional ooh the known and the unknown the tame and the savage the stillness of the pool and the wildness of the sea all at dusk and I've made a long series of those kinds of connections and combinations because I thought it was it satisfied a an idea for me okay change so these are just some photographs from different Commission's I had in st. Louis and in New York and other places where the large-format camera was an alternative method for me to see what the world looked like around me I don't know something so beautiful to me about that the the geometry drawn on that green astroturf the precision of it the American landscape I don't know if this has ever happened to any of you I bet it has sometimes you make some photographs and you pin up a print on the wall just to keep your eye on it and I remember that I put this photograph and and this next one on my studio wall and during that year I I kept on adding more photographs and taking photographs away but these two pictures these two portraits stayed and I realized that something had happened that I had never really made portraits before pictures on the street had people in it for sure but they weren't necessarily a portrait in which you went to somebody and you said I need you I want to photograph you but by carrying the big view camera around I became visible whereas when I had a 35-millimeter camera I was invisible in some way and now that people saw me they would come over and speak to me say why are you using that big camera why do you put the cloth over your head I I had a different kind of presence and it it it made me look at people in a very different way and I began to see how interesting each and every one of us really is and so I started to make portraits or I would use this camera and and if somebody came across my path who whose presence I'm gonna throw this into the orders if somebody you know entered my space and they seemed interesting to me for whatever reason whether they're shy like this young woman is timid or whether there were you know strong and aggressive it didn't matter as long as they as as long as they gave me some feeling of connection to them we've seen her all over all I've so I in in two years I promptly made almost 1500 portraits of total strangers one photograph each people whose lives seem to be interesting enough for me to want to enter the space and to talk to them and to find out something about them someone asked me at one time do you ever did you ever you know come to some kind of a dead end with your photographs do you ever know things don't work and yeah this this is a moment for me I was asking a question using the large format camera about time and space I tried to make a photograph in which one space was divided with three photographs three separate photographs in which the horizon line held things together and I made this series but it felt that I had to be a director in order to make the photographs and I had spent my whole life on the streets taking photographs of things that were out of my control and I wasn't sure that I could make photographs that had any meaning if I directed them I don't think I was a like a Hollywood director who could create these kinds of tableaux vivants or Me's all set in some way so I made I made a year's worth of these pictures complicated kind of funny things and then at some point I just turned away and I thought it's a cul-de-sac it's not it's not for me and of course now at this point in photographic time lots of people make these kinds of assembled photographs in which fiction or a narrative is part of the game okay we're taking a very short pause here because in 1995 my father who was 89 developed Alzheimer's and he began to wander and get lost and couldn't find his keys or anything and when I understood that I thought there are there are millions of people with Alzheimer's and I wanted to see if I could do something about it so I took him on a road trip with my son so there were three generations of my family each 30 years apart and we traveled from Florida back to New York City and I made a movie which has been seen by more than 40 million people he showed in France and Germany and Italy and in all the festivals in America and MoMA but we we decided to put a three minutes can you hang in for 3 minutes my wife wrote and played this music for a film [Applause] [Music] pop yes I want to ask you a few questions about the family about our family I've got our family yes you've got three sons yes what are their names Ricky show and who's your youngest son the youngest one is I think he's David I didn't remember name anymore Joe Rick and yo Ricky and yeah Stevie Stevie oh yeah do you know what do you know what Rick does to make a living what is what his career he's trying to do a lot of a lot of stuff feed you if he were following me he'd be doing it on the crook but what's he famous for Ricky yeah well Fred facies my kids you are also and because that alone gives you enough fame so you don't know what Rick does Ricky Rick is a half time a part-time Beck that book just great try to think about what Rick does Rick Rick is an artist right you got it nut got it you got it right and I'm Joel what do I do uh-huh you're a dog you're my best number one don't get serious pop do you remember what it is I do that's why pop from Dominus what what is it I do that is a not that what is what do i do you make money how do you want exact every year straight off the street okay what about Stevie I don't know does it bother you that you can't remember your kids names sometimes and you can't remember what they do well I'll tell you yeah I see them hello goodbye [Applause] oh he was a great character and there were moments of wisdom out of this man whose memory was really going he he wants he said to me and this is interesting because it's again it's another starting point I went to visit him in Florida when I heard he had gotten lost again and I sat with him someplace and he said you know Joel the trouble with me is I never get to the point where I get to the point and it was as if I heard the message that he was in there that he knew that something was going wrong he couldn't quite handle it but he communicated that to me and in that moment truly in that very moment I thought oh I've got to make a film about him because he knows something is wrong and it's my job to try to do a public service and show this film this Alzheimer's situation to families all over the world so that they will help their grandparents or parents when they find them with this with this illness and I committed myself to really three years of work raising the money making the film editing the film distributing the film it was hard work ask any filmmaker they'll tell you the same story but it was worth it and I I learned something about a kind of social consciousness that I think is very important in the in the later development of my work we're back thank you I'm gonna move along because it is getting late and it's blame it on this because every time I press the button I have to press it four or five times to get the next frame up so that's added time to this evening so continuing with the large format camera a kind of simplicity became desirable to me a pairing down getting rid of as much information as possible and just trying to deal with the simplicity in this case of the sky the horizon line and water for many years I did photographs in color much in the in the same way a tsujimoto and black and white of just the spareness of this the elements air and water as as they change if you stay by the sea side how much can you see how many different things are visible in a simple division of up and down you know air and water during the same time I had been I had a studio in midtown Manhattan and I was photographing a series looking south from my windows this was the view from my windows and I photographed it regularly for 15 years and in the Sun in the summer of 9 2001 I was planning an exhibition called looking south of these photographs in a gallery in Soho and then we all know what happened in 2001 the buildings that were in my pictures were destroyed and I felt that same feeling I had about my father's Alzheimer's I felt as a native New Yorker I wanted to be of service I wanted to see if there was any way I could help and I went down to Ground Zero and as a as an onlooker as a citizen and I stood there watching the smoke rising and I raised my Leica just to look through it there wasn't even a picture to be made and as soon as I raise the camera somebody behind me banged me on my shoulder and said no pictures buddy this is a crime scene and I turned around and and I said to her wait a second this is the public space out here the crime scene is in there don't tell me I can't take a picture she said I'm gonna take that camera away from you the mayor says no photography allowed and at that moment I understood what I could do I thought if no photography is allowed then that means there'll be no record of what was going on in there and I thought history deserves to be recorded and that I would I would be the one that would find my way in and make the record and I did I was able to use my New York I have to forgive me here but my New York street smarts to figure out how to beat them at their game and how to get around the political pressure of not not letting anybody in there and I won the game and I stayed in ground zero for nine months and made 8,500 photographs of everything that happened inside Ground Zero and and during that time with firemen and construction workers and policemen I lived the kind of of life 14 hours a day inside ground zero that made me feel young again I had the same appetite and passion for making photographs that I had when I first started and that is priceless because all of us when we are professionals in something and we move along we have a degree of confidence and you kind of settle into that and something comes along that that turns you over shocks you and and you feel that vitality again and it was worth it I those days are memorable to me I am they were among the happiest days of my life unfortunately it took a tragedy like that but the real experience of working with these men and women inside ground zero was incredibly rewarding and it's affected my life because a lot of the work that I do has a more social content to it now I I think I I think it's when I finish this if the button works how I'll end here in a moment one of the things that I saw in Ground Zero was that every day at the end of the work day they would put all the rubble on a big field more than a hundred meters long and then they would rake through the rubble looking for bones or teeth or something that would give them a DNA clue as to who that dead person was and and one day I saw a fireman raking away and I went over to him and I said you do this every day he said yeah we're looking for fellow firemen we're looking for the other victims he said look we're gardeners he said in the garden of the Dead and I thought what a thing to say that he saw himself doing that and I was so moved by by this ordinary pile of dirt and and it went in in some way I thought wow that's amazing that I wanted to take a picture of something as as dumb as that now at the very same time as 9/11 happened my wife and I had been given a commission to do a book on Tuscany and I spent the advance from the publisher inside ground zero and finally he said you gotta go do your Tuscan stuff and in January the site was quiet for a few weeks and I flew to Tuscany and one of the first things I saw in the winter in Tuscany was this field that had been turned over and frost was was on the earth and I felt don't forget it was a time when terrorism was now becoming our familiar part of everyday life for us and I felt that in Italy and in the countryside here in France too that the people who work the land had a kind of positive attitude a sense of the goodness of it that the continuity of life would go on and I thought let's make a book about Tuscany but let's try to find all of the beauty that comes from a fearlessness not about terrorism but about the good that the world has in it in its consistent way and and that this idea of just photographing dirt led me to thinking about the elements and photographing air Oh or water or fire and I thought is it possible that I could photograph the the phenomena of air and water and fire and earth and make it interesting make the pictures big enough that you could walk into it got out with the bishop would they with this big and look this good so that the experience of the viewer would be to enter into and into the phenomena itself I mean I don't know if it would be successful or not but it's a question and that's part of what is so interesting about photography is that it raises these questions and you answer it with a risky photograph and sometimes you're wrong but it's worth asking the question it's worth pushing the boundaries of photography so that you might get a new answer you might make a new kind of photograph for yourself so there's no conclusion really it's just the next thing in the the questions that the medium raises while I was thinking about this question are you okay can I can continue or should I is it you're alright you're not too cold I'll come around with my jacket and we'll all hold you because I have like three minutes left you can hang in for that okay that's great what even five okay yeah I'm yours while I was thinking about this idea of the elements I I was going to have a show in in Cologne and I decided I wanted to make a video about about the elements and I went to a an Olympic diving pool in Florida because I wanted to watch the divers enter the water I don't know why I just wanted to sometimes you do that and I Oh what happened I how do I go back oh look at its magic just say the work it goes right back that's called the hat trick anyway I was watching the divers enter the water and every time they came in they brought in an enormous volume of air and the air in the water after the diver swam away the air would form a mushroom cloud and rise to the surface and then disappear and it was it strengthened my idea about the elements about water and air and fire and water so sometimes you you have an idea and you follow it through and it gives you another opportunity and you know out of this came I think an interesting video which I'm not going to show you because I don't have it here so back to the Hat this is say Zhaan's hat not far away in Exxon Provence you will see this hat sitting on on a shelf in Cezanne studio and while I was doing a work on Provence a few years ago I went to the studio and I was so moved by the fact that he had painted the walls a grey a dark grey that I I wondered what was it in his mind that he needed in his painting that caused him to paint the walls of grey and so as a way of observing that I asked them if I could take all of his objects and put them on the table and photograph them against the grey wall it was like an act of homage I I wanted to understand more about his thinking and so I made I made you know 80 80 or 85 objects and some of them I've made in giant prints 3 meters high in this kind of a grid just so that they could be studied and reflected upon and for some reason that pushed me another step further to two if I could just click at this to go to see the work of morandi another painter who I admired and I'm living in Italy now and Bologna is not far from where I live so I went up to see Morandi studio and to look at his objects too and I found myself becoming interested in the still life quite a simple kind of still life not arranging objects because I had never made a still life in all the years as a photographer I never made us to life I sometimes you would find something on a table after people had dinner and you would have all these plates and dishes around that might make a still life but I never organized anything and so I find myself now interested in the idea of the still life it's a far cry from street photography but I find myself using some of the energy that I saw on the street the way things are gathered together or related it's not about beauty in the conventional sense of the still life where you organize to make a beautiful composition but it's about trying to find in these objects which are all castoffs I most of these I've bought in V Gagne here in Provence when everybody puts their junk out on the street I I go and I often I'll give you one euro for this okay and and these cast-off objects when I take them back I try to find in each of them their anima their spirit by turning them around and so I've made a few of these I don't know still lifes that are that are strange I I can't explain them yet I'm in the middle of doing them now and I find it incredibly enjoyable as if I'm having a conversation with things that were cast offs and thrown away and I'm I don't know where it's going I just know that when I go into my studio everyday and I move these things around it gives me a certain pleasure and it may be age-related I'm glad you laugh because it's it's true we see in the history of art artists reach a certain age and suddenly they paint the four seasons or they well they paint the skull it's imminent death is coming and it makes people think about things in a different way so I'm rescuing these dead objects and I'm bringing them back to life briefly for a moment or two and sometimes they have a conversation with each other that I find very amusing and I'm shocked that I mean even interested in it well you've been very good all have you've been very patient this is the last picture it's a self-portrait and it's where I find myself now and in the course of my life photography has helped me find myself in any and every different way and it is a medium that I I I bow down to for the gift that it's given me thank you that's immaturity yo [Applause] [Music] [Music] you you
