“There is a dawning awareness that you feel good in this place. Something here makes you attentive, brings you to an awakened state. But you can’t know that beforehand.”
Interview by Constance Sullivan, from Creating A Sense of Place, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990
CS: Why do you choose to ph
I went because I was undergoing some changes in my life in terms of questions I was asking about photography, and there were certain things I had to give up, and I had to be ruthless about it. In order to do that I had to work away from New York City for a while. I knew that the time and work that a view camera required did not allow me to work in a big city in the same way that I had worked with a 35mm camera. So I had to abandon that notion completely and take myself to a place where life was simple, where life moved more slowly, where there was a chance to use this tool and to see differently. I had no idea what it was going to look like. I even kidded myself thinking I would go to Provincetown and work on the street, because it was busy, but smaller, I thought it was manageable. I hardly made any pictures on the street. Everything else seemed to call to me. And I believe these things are related in part to the instrument we choose to work with. An 8 x 10 camera isn’t for horse races. You do what it tells you to do.
