NEW YORK LANDSCAPES

Okay, I was seduced by subject matter, I admit it! While photographing an office interior with the view of Central Park shown here, I decided to try to capture those cityscapes that I had grown up with, but never photographed. Ten years later these images became a book: Manhattan Lightscape (Abbeville Press, 1990).

Looking back, this work was not “just” pictorial after all. It was part and parcel of my argument with photography… this time, about scale. When Ansel Adams photographed Half Dome at Yosemite, he gave us an 8x10 or at most, a 20x24 inch print. A great deal of the power of a visual experience is rooted in one’s own scale, relative to the scale of what you’re photographing – in this case, the surrounding landscape. I hoped that if I presented my photographs at the size of the window I saw them through, I might be able to communicate the scale of the view I meant to capture. I was wrong. When the work was first shown in New York, I realized that even a huge print - 8 feet by 10 feet - seemed a miniature of the view it portrayed.

During this period of experimenting with illusions that were inherently photographic, I also began to paint black and white photographic prints. Thinking that one day I might be called upon to explain my use of paint with photography, I made the Paint Can image to elucidate that relationship. Years later I would again bring painting to my photography in the work done in collaboration with Native American painter Bunky Echo-Hawk.

NEXT IMAGES: LIFE-SIZE - 8X10 PORTRAITS