When you start out, you're not really aware. I didn't have a sense of photographic history.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.
I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both.
I guess I knew my dad was into photography, so a part of me was interested in picking it up to understand him a little better.
To know ahead of time what you're looking for means you're then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.
Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from.
My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young.
One of the reasons that I do a lot of different kinds of pictures is because I learn a lot when I'm doing them.
I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.
I have a photographic memory.
Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.