BRS: In this digital age, can photography ever become an additive process? Like the photographer would become more like a painter?
SS: A couple thoughts in regard to that. One is that there is something arbitrary about the decision making that a photographer engages in. What I mean by that is this: I can get out of the car and stand by the edge of the highway and take a picture that looks like a totally natural landscape, untouched by the hand of man. I could move back six inches and include the guardrail in the picture and the meaning of the picture changes dramatically. There is a marginal point where I can stand here and it’s one picture or I can stand there and it’s a different picture. And this decision, of what is the meaning of what’s in the rectangle is entirely my decision. It sounds wrong, because I didn’t create the landscape, but that decision so drastically alters the meaning that the weight of the decision becomes very interesting.
The same thing with portraits, facial expressions flow in time, the picture takes the face out of the flow of time. As I’m looking at you, facial expressions are passing by in the time that we’re sitting here, I know that I can take a picture now, or a second later, a half second earlier, and have a different meaning. People could make different judgments, even though those judgments are really not about you, they’re about this image of you. If this is true, I don’t see it as a huge leap to go to photograph that’s been set up, say, by Jeff Wall. If I see a picture and I think, there needs to be a car in it, I’ll get in my car and drive it in there. If it’s too close to the edge, then I’ll back it up a foot. In that sense, I see the setup or performative picture as a different branch in the continuum.
BRS: But what makes it correct that the car is two inches from the border instead of right on the border?
SS: {laughs} That’s where my personality projects itself on the picture…There’s no right distance, a distance that’s the correct one, it’s interesting for me to be conscious of that. But being conscious of it doesn’t determine if it’s correct, it becomes something internal and personal: this feels right.
The bold parts are what fascinate me and I suppose are at the core of style; those cumulative moments of a life that have culminated in an instant and will result in either failure or success. Given this, how much influence can we, do we, actually possess over the outcome? And is redirection a possibility should your results more often than not fail?
Found Here: American Suburb X
