I felt that male artists were photographed a lot, and I wasn’t seeing as many representations of women artists, and those that I did see weren’t done the way that I would have done them. My switch to photography emerged from my desire to document the community of women artists. I started using a camera in 1989, and over the next couple of years, I photographed over 70 women artists. After I completed that project I just continued to use the camera.

As you became more comfortable with the camera, and this project came to an end, you turned the camera on yourself.

I was in a feminist stage then. So I made some naked self-portraits as Eve, as Hecate (the Greek death goddess), and as the maiden, the middle aged woman, and the crone. I also made a series called “Conversations with a Dead Pig” beginning in 1993.

These photographs are less strictly documentary. You’re using props. There are traces of movement in the images also. The pictures are constructed. You began to see photography as a medium that could accommodate a different kind of input from the artist.

I found that photographs enabled me to express concerns that I hadn’t been able to express before, in painting or in sculpture. I was able to deliver a more specific message.

At that time, there was a lot of discussion about the male gaze. I wondered, can photography represent the naked female body without it being a male projection? How do you make concrete something that has to do with the inside of the body, where the feminine is located? That’s a very difficult thing, I’m not sure if it has been done successfully. I also wanted to reexamine the connection between woman and nature, from a contemporary perspective and in relation to feminist iconography.

You wear the mask of a hare in some of these pictures, and there is a real pig head that you use as a prop.

I’m a big Beuys fan, and he knew the hare was a traditional symbol of the feminine in Europe, and it was one of the key animals he identified with. Hares are prolific, and they are also capable of superfoetation, in which an already pregnant female can become pregnant again. Beuys made a lot of hare pieces, including the performance, “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,” in which he carried a real dead hare in his arms. I thought it was time to hear what the hare had to say. So I made the series called “Conversations with a Dead Pig.” I wore a hare mask in those pictures and there is a real pig head in my lap or at my feet. I had thought the pig would represent a male chauvinist pig, but in fact, the conversation was different than I thought it would be. The pig itself was so benign, he had a sweet smile and he didn’t appear aggressive or antagonistic or any of those things that might have evoked a different kind of conversation. There is movement in those pieces because I wanted the photographs to reflect the active nature of the conversation.

All of your work is made in natural light, even the ones at night. You started making portraits of yourself at night when you were making these imaginative self-portraits for particular reasons.

Traditionally, the sun has been thought of as male, and the moon has been thought of as female. It goes along with some chauvinistic concepts linking the fearsome, unpredictable side of the night with female emotions and intuition, as opposed to strong, clear daylight, which is associated with men. And of course the cycles of the moon and the cycles of women’s bodies are linked. It’s interesting to note that in Japan and in Morocco they see a hare in the moon, not a man.

And then you started photographing other places in moonlight.

I did several residencies in the National Parks from 1996 until 2002. I zeroed in on photographing what I call “rocks with a presence”, shooting by moonlight as well as during the day. Then I started traveling more and photographed special rocks that were revered by other people in other cultures, and not just selected by me. I grew up in northern Idaho, about 100 miles away from the Canadian border, and I’m comfortable with camping and the out-of-doors.

Some of these stones are seen as animate.

In Japanese Shintoism, everything has a spirit within it, and in Japan, people visit and pay homage to these stones. I feel a kinship with that culture because I do feel that everything has a spirit. To some people, rocks and stones are the bones of the earth. There’s something so basic about them. They are a link to the past and to the future.

Around that time I also started doing photogravure. It’s an early photographic process from the late 19th century. You transfer a photographic image to a copper plate and print it like an etching. It’s a continuous tone process that gives a full range of tones. And it’s the most archival process—you use good etching inks and good rag paper and that’s it. It’s a labor-intensive, temperamental process. And while it is an old process, I’m doing things with it that they never did then. I use blue inks, for example. Photographically, I make long night exposures with star trails, with movement and time. And they didn’t do that then either.

You did a project called “Urban Orators” in the late 1990’s. This is a strictly urban project.

I live in the city, and I can’t always be outdoors, and I do need to work whether I’m traveling or not. So I have done some urban projects.

On my way to my day job I used to pass this man whom people referred to as The Preacher. He stood on the median on Park Avenue with his Bible, and he was there every morning, rain or shine. His performative aspect was captivating. He had a distinctive way of walking in a circle, and the cadence and rhythm of his speech were also highly developed. He talked about the Bible and also about current events. He made me realize that there are people out there who feel theymust say their message publicly. I felt he was as dedicated, or even more dedicated, than most of the artists I know in getting his message out. So I photographed and recorded him and some other urban orators, too.

And then, on one of your travels, you saw a menhir.

I was in Scotland in 2003, on Orkney, and I saw the Ring of Brodgar. I pitched my tent next to this ancient ring of stones, and I photographed all night long. Then I started to focus on these standing megalithic stones instead of stones in general.Menhirs are found in the British Isles, Brittany, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and Poland. And now the travel and the photography have become really intertwined.

What do we know about these stones?

Not very much. That’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to them. They’re mysterious. You can’t carbon date stones, and even if there are remains underneath, they could have been added later. As Keith Carter says, “I always love what I don’t understand.”

M. Scott Peck is the only one who said, “Maybe they’re art.” He suggests that we may be ignoring that they were intended as works of art. Do you see them as the product of artists?

Someone with a lot of charisma organized those people to select those stones and to transport them over long distances and erect them in certain configurations. That person must have been an artist, and they were making art. To me, they’re sculpture.

I think of landscapes as being traditionally horizontal, and the portrait format as more vertical. When I saw your pictures of the standing stones, my first thought was that they were portraits.

The stones have a somewhat anthropomorphic, vertical, thin shape. I think the photographs are portraits. I want to make photographs that focus on the stones themselves—their individual characters—even though the gravures are also about the particular atmospheric conditions and the experience of being there at that particular time. It’s possible that the stones are also a reflection of myself, the solitary individual artist who is out there in the elements.

Do you use any digital technology in your work?

I do print from the computer in addition to making photogravures. I make inkjet prints from film scans. The inks and papers have improved enormously, and I think that is the future. But I love film, and I hope I’ll always be able to use it. Nikon’s not making film cameras anymore–every day there’s another nail in that coffin. But I suppose there will always be a way to work with it, just as photogravure is an old process that comes around every so often. Artists might have to make their own film or coat their own paper to work in that way.

These stones are remote. By virtue of the fact that you’re putting them onto film, we can now have many of these stones in many different places at once. We can partake of some of their special qualities. This is something that photography does uniquely well. And with digital technology, they can also be on the internet, and millions of people can share their qualities.

I want to communicate, and I want to reach as wide an audience as I can. I’m more interested in that than in making a unique piece of artwork.

You shoot on site and often don’t see what’s on the film until you get back home. You’re at the mercy of the weather and a host of other variables. There’s a lack of direct control over the product, in some ways.

I like that randomness, that element of chance. But not everyone feels that way. And then some people don’t appreciate the way it operates in my work. Some dealers have asked me to replicate the atmosphere of a particular image, and that’s impossible. The images are the result of particular conditions at a specific time. Being there in itself is quite an accomplishment sometimes, which not everybody would want to do in the first place! It takes an artist to want to do these crazy things.

Your work has become less overtly political and feminist. You’re communicating with pre-history, the 19th century, places all over the world.

I’m not in a very political phase right now. I feel defeated by the political climate, and I don’t want any part of what this country is doing. The sublime and the mysterious are things that drive me. I just read a short essay that Tom Robbins wrote about Joseph Campbell, and he says that people need to reconnect with myth. People may not realize that it’s missing in their lives. They may not realize they need to reconnect with nature and natural things. If I put even one pebble on that see-saw to help reestablish some balance, I’ll be happy. It’s all going one way now, and it’s not a way I believe in. And I have to make that statement.

In an artist’s statement you have talked about romance.

That’s seen as an old-fashioned concept right now. I have a romantic soul. Going into the unknown and voyaging is romantic by its very nature, and I’m interested in beauty and the spiritual sense that transcends specific religions and that brings people together. I have to follow that path with heart, even though I know that people are almost looking for anti-beauty in landscapes right now.

Is the artist a romantic quester, an orator of some kind?

We’re all looking for immortality. We want to make something that will be part of that chain that stretches from the past to the future. We want to say something that will have meaning for our time and possibly later times, regardless of what’s going on around us now. Artists select those particular things they want to make a statement about. And we work in a solitary fashion. Artists require solitude where most people fear it. Our society doesn’t value solitude and thinking and reflection. But from solitary searching, the artist might be the one who teaches people what it feels like, or might have felt like, to be someone or something else.

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Your current project is called Evans Pond, Sequential Photographs, a Long-term Study. Where is Evans Pond?

It’s about 80 miles south of New York, in New Jersey. The pond is part of the Cooper River system, which flows from Pennsylvania into southern New Jersey.

Is it a familiar landscape? How did you settle on this particular place?

I grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, so I’m familiar with this landscape from my childhood.

You started your career as a sculptor. How did you move into photography?

I was drawn to sculpture because it’s multi-dimensional and deals with the environment the way we encounter it. It’s in the world. In the 1970s, when I was studying, sculptors were working with movement, installation and performance, and it offered a more expanded concept of artmaking to me than painting did at that time. My early work was installation-oriented.

The sculptors I admired in the 60s and 70s were using photography as an extension of their practice. Robert Smithson was wandering around New Jersey and photographing. His photographic work was an early reference for me, and also the photographic work of Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark.

So you were inspired by sculptor’s photographs in particular?

Yes. There was a sense of continuum between their sculpture and their photography. Their photographs used multi-format shots that were relational. They presented images in grids and matrixes, and thought of the ensemble as “documentary”—as opposed to the “painterly” aesthetic of single photographs. Strangely, no one discussed Gordon Matta-Clark’s photographs as photographs until very recently. Sometime in the late 1990s the Guggenheim finally created the category of “conceptual photography” for work of this type. Now it fits in beautifully with other efforts to multiply and deconstruct the camera’s image.

So how did you finally move into photography, and into this project?

At first, I simply wanted to photograph my own sculpture in order to take charge of its representation. Soon after, I began to study the history of photography, particularly the photography of sculpture. I took a lot of photographs of statuary at that time in order to help my technique with the camera and the darkroom. Then, in 1991, I got permission to research the photographic archives at the Rodin Museum in Paris. The fascinating thing is that the archives are organized by sculpture, not by photographer. All the photographs of “The Burghers of Callais”, taken by different photographers with all different cameras, are in one box. Suddenly I saw photography as a flexible and heterodox medium. And that experience became one of my influences for working in multiple formats, multiple cameras, and multiple media.

Later, I began looking at landscape photographs, and I noticed that most photographers develop a signature style with a signature camera. They go all around the world, photographing different places, briefly, with this one camera, or one technique. And I thought, what if I brought a bunch of different cameras to the same place, and studied it over time?

What kinds of cameras are you using?

Vintage Rollei, Mamiya, Diana, Holga; antique Kodak black box and folding cameras; forgotten brands like Coronet, Lubitel, Genos, Box Tengor, all of which take medium format film. I’ve also used some 35 mm cameras, such as the Nikon F, a 1970s point-and-shoot Kodak Ektanar, and a tiny 1940’s Russian field camera. In 2000 I also started using a Canon Elph digital camera. So I’m studying the media as well as the place.

Using all these cameras, I have become aware of how photographic syntax has changed over time, with technology. I love that a camera that was made to photograph the world in 1910 can be used to take a picture today. The culture has changed, taste has changed, and production values have changed, but the machine will still work.

You’ve used a variety of films, and an incredible variety of printing techniques as well.

I have. I’ve mostly made gelatin silver prints, but I’ve also done a significant amount of color work in slides, transparencies, and some c-prints. I have some straight from the lab RC prints. I’ve printed on clear acetate and duratrans as well as all different kinds of paper, even old paper and paper that’s been fogged. I have digital prints made on the computer, too.

“Evans Pond, Dec. 24, 1999” [above] resulted from darkroom manipulation. I made it from two low-density negatives. One was an underexposed infrared negative—black and white infrared film reverses some dark tomes to white. For the other negative, I photographed the textured, painted surface of a painting I had made, and underdeveloped the film so only the brushstrokes showed on the film. When I sandwiched the two negatives in the enlarger, the result was this image with a ghostly, painting-like surface.  I used a warm-toned paper and a selenium bath for this image and it split the color range into grays and mauves. This image is entirely artificial and has a mood I want sometimes.

This project is about ways of observing a single place using many different cameras, formats, films, and techniques. The qualities of observation or the limits of the different tools you’re using are an issue for this project. You’re not providing a definitive portrait of this place so much as exploring what can be observed with these different pieces of equipment. What have you discovered as a result of your explorations?

I couldn’t predict how the project would develop when I began it in 1997. The rules that I made were that I would visit the pond regularly and build up an archive of images. I wanted the project to be documentary, conceptual and aesthetic, romantic and rigorous.

One thing I have learned is that even with this surfeit of description, the forest is extremely elusive. The only way to know a place is to go there and walk around in it. But of course it keeps changing! So, in order to focus my attention more on any changes in the forest—seasonal or otherwise–I ended up going to a few specific places again and again. Originally, I had been organizing the images in chronological order, but now I have them organized by site.

“Evans Pond, March 13, 2004” [triptych, above] is a piece from what I call Site 1, at the edge of the pond. These three images form a broken panorama. I photographed them originally so the frames abut each other, but I’ve presented them here as an incomplete panorama that your eye completes.

So this is a single piece, meant to be seen in a particular way, as an incomplete panorama?

This is one piece that I put together in this way. When you have several images in a row, and they relate to each other, it’s called parallel perspective. This is a concept from Chinese scroll painting. The idea is that the viewer passes along parallel to the scene, rather that going toward the vanishing point, as in Renaissance perspective. I like parallel perspective because it’s kinesthetic and embodies the viewer. This is one way of dealing with the camera’s limitations.

Are the camera’s limitations also our limitations? We add to what we see, to the way we see things.

There’s an involuntary response where your eye wants to connect the images, but it can’t, because there’s always this separation. Intuitively, we know that we can connect the whole scene, if only we could overlap the images. There’s a sense of time in these intervals.

That makes me think of music.

When I was growing up, I played music as much as I made art. When you read music, you think of intervals, measures, time and phrasing. All of that has influenced me. When I started making photographs, it always made sense to me to take more than one picture. I’ve always put them in groups, in sequences and phrases. One note doesn’t make sense by itself, and neither does a single image.

Another way I’ve used multiple images to form one piece is the digital print, “Evans Pond, April 16. 2005,” also of Site 1, that I stitched together from several frames [top of article.] My camera lets me knit together overlapping frames, so instead of the eye putting them together, the software knitted this broken image back together. The irregular shape of the photograph that results is a chance effect of the software that I can’t predict. I could crop off the irregular edges, but I always turn that function off in the camera, and I don’t crop the image afterwards, either.

Why?

The original shape of a photograph comes from the lens, which comes from the telescope. It’s round. The convention of cropping that roundness off happened fairly early, because people wanted the photograph to mimic painting’s rectilinear format. The circle shape that the lens makes is bigger than what we see on the negative, because it’s already been cropped inside the camera. Information is lost. This software reminds us that the rectangular shape of the photograph is only a convention, and we see that the boundary of the photograph is elastic. I adapted this idea of the flexible frame from Yve Lomax, a British photographer. She used collage and photography to release the image from the constraints of the frame, and the constraints of time.

You’re thinking a lot about time in your work. Your project is unfolding over time, and you also consider how the viewer might experience an image over time. And the concept of time itself has changed dramatically over the past century.

There’s a weird hybrid of empirical, scientific time and the psychological sense of time in photography, and I have been reading and thinking about that. I’ve read Proust, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze on Bergson. I’ve thought about Einstein’s theory of relativity, and how all these ideas about time begin to dovetail in the digital era.

Do you consider how attitudes towards nature have changed over time? Nature used to be scary and awesome. Now it’s like a fragile baby. We’re animals, we’re part of nature. But we’re apart from it, and have the power to alter it in negative ways.

This project didn’t start out as an environmental commentary at all, but as I notice changes in the landscape over time, the more this project seems to move in that direction.The Natural Contract is a book that came out in the 1990s by Michel Serres, a French philosopher. He saw that humanity was becoming another massive force on the earth, and predicted that the earth would eventually react to our collective force with its own tremendous, earthly energy. He refers to a print by Goya, in which two men are fighting in the mud. We wonder which one will win. But in fact, he suggests that maybe the earth will swallow them both before either one of them wins.

Are you interested in other photographers whose work addresses the environment in contemporary ways?

Michael Ashkin has done a photographic project on superfund sites, bravely going into these really toxic sites. And David Meisel has flown over ruined lakes that used to be beautiful and lush and are now wastelands. At first, we look at his prints as aesthetic images, even abstract images, but they are not just that. The work of Ashkin and Meisel might be called sublime. My project is a counterpoint to that approach. I’m a pedestrian in a local, familiar environment, and I’m documenting it over time. The drama quotient is low, but the stakes are equally high.

Talk to me about presentation. Your work will be shown at the Hamon Art Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 2006.

I work so hard on the surface of the print, I’d like them to be seen without glass. Prints seem embalmed to me when they’re under mats or glass. And when you go through the mounting process, something is lost. I’ve always loved just looking through prints in boxes, and handling them. Some of my images are unique prints, but I think most could be presented as display prints, as proofs, or sacrificial prints, without glass, with the editions made separately.

You also write about art. Talk about how your writing informs your art. Not every artist writes about art, after all.

I write to learn more about an artist or an exhibition, so my critical writing has a personal, research purpose. At the same time, I want to serve the public by making contemporary art more accessible. Early in my career, I worked as a guard at Dia, and I was struck by how mystified the public was by the work in front of them. I’ve found that my ability to read work as an artist is valuable, and writing is a way to share it. Finally, I’ve been in New York a long time now. I’ve developed a point of view on the contemporary art scene here. My writing is another way to participate in the art world, besides making art myself.

Is there any aspect of photography, any film, any camera, any paper or printing technique that you have not explored in this project?

Definitely! More color photography techniques await, and I’m looking forward to making larger digital prints.

Have you given yourself a time limit for this project?

I haven’t. It seems to reach a limit from time to time, and then I keep going deeper. I’m always glad I did. As long as I have a new way to go with the project, I will keep going.

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