DINERS

Living only a block from the Laight Street Market Diner , I ate there often and the iconic, kitsch and highly stylized design caught my attention. At that time especially, diners were known and loved throughout America. I decided to do a portfolio of Diners.

By the time the project was completed in 1973, I was a professional architectural photographer and fairly adept at making objects look “good” in photographs. I thought to myself, “So what do I photograph next, fire hydrants?” Surely there was more to photography than simply choosing a subject and making images of it. Thus began my next argument with photography.

Up to that point, historically, photographs were about their subject matter , but I knew that painters, for example, had ventured beyond subject matter. Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock talked about paint, not subject matter, in their works. How could this apply to photography? How does one stop focusing (pun certainly intended) on the subject matter and talk instead about photography itself?

NEXT IMAGES: FROM SUBJECT MATTER TO PHOTOGRAPHY