Throughout the history of photography we see photographers moving the bar regarding where they're finding charged material, what material they find of interest and 50 years ago it wouldn't have been found in a grilled cheese sandwich I started photographing food as part of the series American Surfaces where I was also photographing every person I met on the trip, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used, residential architecture, commercial architecture, every television set I looked at, there were a whole series of categories, and food was one of them and food was fascinating I engage with it at least three times a day and so it was a feature of the trip and it was also, as with any of these categories, it was a way of opening a door into the culture I was walking through and exploring The major visual issue for me with American Surfaces was how to take a picture that felt natural, is the term I would use-- I used at the time I wanted to take a picture that looked like seeing If you can imagine the difference between how you speak and how you write, and that there is a little bit more formality, perhaps a little bit of a more staid quality, to how you write I wanted to explore that difference Is there a difference between how I see and how I photograph? And why is there that difference and can I overcome it by being aware of it? Uncommon Places grew out of American Surfaces I wanted to be able to make larger prints and the color negative film at the time wasn't really capable of it So I wanted to go to a larger negative and found that I liked working on a tripod That led me to really alter the way I was working and began a long process of formal exploration in photography So I got an 8 by 10, and that's the camera I used for the rest of the series One of the realities of an 8 by 10 in color is that the process is very expensive So I had to economize somewhere and it was to only take one picture of anything I mean, that if I were photographing a building I would choose one angle It made any picture a much longer venture because I have to walk around and see the different possibilities I didn't intend for this to be an educational process, it was simply an economic decision But what I found was it was forcing me to decide, "What did I really want?" There could be five, or 10, or more, equally visually valid pictures made There could be a hundred equally valid pictures made But I had to decide what I wanted And I found that over time, doing this again, and again, and again, that a kind of certainty began to develop In 73 I took a picture of a billboard with a painting of Mount Shasta on it and behind the billboard was this spectacular sky that was far grander than the conception of the artist who painted the billboard, which was sitting in a kind of scrubby landscape and it's a wonderful picture but when I look at it I sometimes think, "Tt's a no brainer," and than I have other pictures, like the one of the grilled cheese sandwich, that's more about really looking at the world with attention, seen in the state of heightened awareness Everyone knows the expression, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and that's simply not true There are some thoughts that it's impossible to describe in a picture and there is an experience of looking at a photograph that no number of words can communicate The more words you use the longer it takes to read it and you lose the simultaneity of the experience and the specificity of the description That's why I take the picture If I could put it into words with as much clarity and complexity it would save me a lot of money on gas and a lot of time I could just write it
