One of the workshop participants had shown me a single 8 X 10 photograph of a power plant where he actually was the general manager of this power cooperative. It was quite magical to me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I remembered seeing it and it was this metallic turbine and I thought it was beautiful. I had never been in a power plant before, but I felt, without being overly dramatic, compelled to make photographs of this for myself.
In my mind I needed a symbol of today's technology, and I realized that what I wanted to photograph was the Space Shuttle. And so that's where Places of Power came into being.
In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.
On two occasions, utility executives I'd never met had looked at me and said, 'I thought you'd be bigger!' In a way, I took that as a compliment!
I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.
'Vanity Fair' did this grid thing a couple years ago, connecting people who've worked together, and I had the most branches on it or whatever, because I'd worked with so-and-so and so-and-so worked with so-and-so, and I was kind of in the middle.
My brother was a great audience, and if he liked the picture, he would laugh and laugh and laugh, and he would want to keep the picture. Making people laugh with an image I had created... what power that was!
'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.
None of us knew what this power plant looked like. We had no schematic drawing.
I remember doing a shoot for Herb Ritts, hanging off the Eiffel Tower - that wasn't your usual day at the office. It was terrifying, and in the end, you couldn't really tell how high I was because the photographer was scared of heights, so he was quite far away from me.