My photographic style evolved out of my long-standing fascination with altered perspective. From the beginning I was adamant about using no darkroom tricks to achieve the skewed dimensions of my work. Instead I would alter the environment before my camera, using a variety of techniques, and take a straight photograph of the manipulated setting. I would meticulously draw people and animals on cardboard and add them to the setting I was photographing. I would create the cardboard cutouts in sections, often drawing a head ten times normal scale while drawing the body at half normal scale, placing the head in the deep background and the torso in the extreme foreground, then matching them together in the view finder. To create hands that would rest on a table, I would draw the torso in a normal perspective and draw the hands in a super elongated manner, allowing them to curl onto the table. The flattening effect of photography would make the hands appear three- dimensional. Often I would use real people or objects in close proximity to the cutouts to establish scale and provide the viewer with clues to unraveling the perspective puzzle. The people in the photographs were never models, but rather the people I found in the places I went to photograph. I generally let them pose themselves. After the photograph was taken, I would abandon the scene and all the props I'd created, left in place to intrigue, delight, or confuse anyone who happened by long after I was gone.

For me the straight photograph is the ultimate confirmation of reality, and I admittedly reveled in the tortures of subverting that reality while maintaining a complete allegiance to it. I would never have dreamed of altering anything in the darkroom, or, God forbid, Photoshop. It was my purpose to create and then confirm the actuality my own imagination integrated into and juxtaposed against the real world, then captured with the mechanical veracity provided by the camera. For my photography I used exclusively black-and-white film. For me black-and-white photography has inherently surreal, nostalgic and subliminally truthful qualities to it, perfect for my purposes.

Boris Karloff street piece description

Boris Karloff Street Piece 1979

There was this little bar in Denton where I was allowed to drink for free in exchange for doing a new soap drawing on their front window every week. One particular night I was there with my girlfriend Tarssa. A car turned onto the street that dead-ended into the bar, shining its headlights through the window, which created a distorted shadow down the side of the wall. I had an epiphany. If you traced the distorted shadow cast by the drawing onto the wall, wiped the drawing off the window, then placed a camera exactly where the light source had been and took a photograph, the distorted tracing on the wall, almost at a right angle to the camera, would appear flat as if you'd photographed the drawing still in the window. Unable to articulate this new concept to Tarssa, I decided to create a piece to illustrate the idea. I took a picture of Boris Karloff and traced it onto a piece of clear plastic. I then mounted the plastic on an easel, set up the easel on a dead-end street, set up a fixed focal point behind the plastic, then, looking at the street with one eye through the drawing on the clear plastic, I directed my friend Jay to draw the image by placing stones and garbage onto the street. I then removed the easel with the plastic, set up a camera at my fixed focal point, had my sister lie in the middle of the drawing, then snapped a picture. This concept provided the basic groundwork for my photographic work.

Grandmother

A friend asked me to make a photograph that included a mirror, so you could see how I do it. Here it is. There I am in the mirror with a 4 x 5 camera shooting the picture. Just in front of me you may notice the back side of a cardboard drawing of Grandmother's torso. It isn't corrugated cardboard, so I was able to bend it so her hands would lie flat on the table top. Her fingers are extremely elongated, and since they are at a sharp angle to the camera, they are foreshortened into the correct dimensions from the camera's perspective. The drawing of her head is mounted on the same wall as the mirror. The photo of my grandmother I used as reference is taped to the top of the drawing.

Art outside the lines

It was a bright Texas afternoon 1979. I had my friend Jay stand next to the wall of an abandoned building in downtown Dallas. As he stood still I traced the outline of his shadow on the wall. I then pulled out a can of flat black spray paint and filled it in. Jay stepped away and the painted shadow stayed. We walked around and did a few more. Later that night we came back to the scene of our crime to see how people responded to our shadows. A guy walked by and spotted one. He stopped and looked around. He seemed to be trying to spot the person who was casting the shadow. He took a few steps closer to the shadow then let out a laugh, shook his head and continued on his way. Success. The next week we got hold of some old plywood. Cut it into squares, coated it with yellow enamel, then, using a little black enamel I painted "PEDS" engaged in activities other than "XING." We then set out bolting them to poles around Dallas. My idea was to create little moments of unexpected entertainment for people, to put a little art where people least expect it. I was in this frame of mind one afternoon when I found myself caught in rush hour traffic on Central Expressway. Sitting there in my car for a half hour or so staring at a seemingly endless row of billboards I found myself thinking, "If there were art on these billboards this wouldn't be such a drag; it might actually be an enjoyable experience, like a drive-by art exhibit!"