I try never to narrate what I'm doing I
try and see what I'm doing entirely in
pictorial terms knowing that what I'm
doing is kind of suppressing their
generic I've said it many times the
viewer is right the poem of the artist
he races in the process of making the
picture so of course people are going to
remarry non-narrative things that's kind
of the magic of the whole thing
my work is to not write it's a literary
activity not writing I was painting
drawing this young person from a very
young age I guess I thought I would do
that but in the 60s have you get to
experiment and get restless like a lot
of people I was still pretty young then
and photography have charged in its in
the way and
for potential and novelty I used the
word cinematography from my photography
and the reason I use it is because it
shares certain characteristics but the
way photography is done fulfills
essentially that just means there's some
preparation done before the photographs
taken but also there's some
collaboration with other people whether
it's performers or other people who make
things for you kind of stagecraft I
guess you'd call it
I like the idea of inventing my own
themes but once in a while I take the
opportunities that pop up in front of me
I had seen the woodcut that Hokusai had
made in 1830 something of the same
subject and it struck me as somehow
intensely photographic obviously because
the papers were captured in a way in a
sort of instant inanity and just sort of
released the idea that there could be a
photographic expression somehow or this
subject could be rendered again
photographically I don't really want to
take sides I don't think that's very
interesting in that picture you have
this bad guy and this good guy
but I don't really want that identity to
be too terribly fixed it's the only
thing that could that I would imagine
would come out of it is that they their
view about a racial incident gets
suspended such that they can't explain
it to themselves right off the bat I'm
trying to find a way to have the kind of
identification those kind of
identification suspend a little bit or
at least hover so that you don't
immediately jump to them so you might
start wondering about this so-called bad
guy
or just seeing him more objectively you
know we live in the palace we live in a
political society all our relationships
are political in some ways there's no
way to avoid it that's inherent and it's
probably inherited any pictorial or
rendering in any medium that you know
relation between one figure and the
other is somehow mediated political in
that sense but it's not political in the
sense that I'm trying to make any points
I wasn't trying to necessarily say
anything about the Afghanistan war I
thought oh we could have a dialogue of
the dead but really it's more
interesting if they were soldiers
because they would have been killed in a
cause not their own but he's not
personal and that kind of lifted the
dimension of the whole dialogue into
something else raised it and made it
more broad and I thought that could be
fascinating to make gigantic warf
hallucination
I think Paul part is always an
expression of the affection for there
being a world and there's something to
see what you know that there is even
anything exists it's already kind of
joyful relation to what is and then
everything else kind of you know becomes
a detail but they've all are just are
pretty sympathetic people they're
sympathetic of being and I think that's
why people like art
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