[1961] American fine-art photographer
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Language is a very complicated thing, and that’s one of the reasons why I like making photographs.
When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies.... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me.
So much of my obsession with being a documentarian comes from this deep-seated sense of the loss of time, and of how things shift so quickly.
I’m kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.
It’s a really hard thing to cover all your bases and still make photographs that challenge you as an artist.
I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing since I was nine. I was making portraits of my friends. I was making self-portraits, I was making images of the neighborhood.
I concentrate on disturbing the devices that society imposes on variant communities to keep them “ghettoized” by class, race, sexuality, and gender.
I’m glad there is a queer, out, dyke artist that’s being called an American photographer.
I do photograph things for people to look at 100 years from now. But we’re such a mediated society that things become historical the next day.
I thought it was important, if I was going to document my [sadomasochistic] community, to document myself within that community.
I wanted to push the whole realm of beauty and elegance, but also to make people scared out of their wits.
My work is always about community. But do I have to do queer work to be part of the queer community?
...things become mainstream when they become imaged over and over again. Something happens in relationship to ideas of representation that makes it more palatable or digestible.
If I were to write a recipe for my photographs, it would be a combo of light, thought, and the ability to carry forth a dialogue in relationship to what an image represents in history.
