Personal Surveys

Providence

The Photo Comp

Little Essex Street

Personal Calibration

2001: 52 Sundays

The Crosses of the
Northern Neck

The Wild Dogs of
Jersey City

Providence

These images were taken from 1977 through 1979. It was a blurry time. I would not have remembered many of my classmates at the Rhode Island School of Design if not for these photographs. They serve as a filter to my past. I can only imagine where Sybil or Larry is now.

The pictures were processed by hand using Sprint photochemistry. Sprint was a photochemical company founded my professor, Paul Krot. Paul dyed his hair bright orange and scented his stop bath with vanilla. The whole fluorescent hair look adopted by the punks may have come from Professor Krot.

These images were in response to a discussion I had with the photographer Lewis Baltz. He had given a lecture about his series of photos of Irvine, California. I asked him what he was feeling when he took the pictures. He maintained that he was feeling nothing and that the images had neutral emotional content, that they were factual and true records of the new industrial park.

How could this be? I thought that all photographs were based on the photographer’s predisposition. That what happened inside the frame belied life. I had this in mind as I took these images: to capture a sliver in time. “Meantime,” to quote Bob Dylan, “life outside goes on all around you,” just beyond the crop of the photograph.

As Errol Morris put it: “Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but there are two words that you can never apply to them: true and false.”

Click to see images.