Q: How did you become a photographer?
A: As a self-taught photographer I learned by filling trash barrels with bad prints. This sounds expensive and wasteful, but at that time I could not both go to school and learn by doing because I had two young children. Also, I already had a lot of visual background: a degree in art history and several years of drawing and painting.

Q: Why did you become a photographer?
A: Photography is the only medium that demands light and natural light is always changing, transforming whatever is before out eyes. It can be a rapid process allowing ideas to progress and mingle, or using a view camera, working in the darkroom, and even in front of a computer screen it can be a thoughtful visual experience.

Q: Do you intend your work to communicate something?
A: At first I thought that good work had to communicate my exact ideas to an audience. Wrong. I now know that every piece of art will communicate with each person in its audience in a different way. Each one of us has an accumulated frame of reference that I call a circle of meaning. My circle and your circle are not likely to overlap perfectly. Both of us will have private knowledge that remains outside the common area of overlap, as well as the overlapped area where communication takes place. Now I find this ever-changing process of varying communication fascinating and alive. Looking at photographs would be much less of a living process if each of us did not arrive in front of pictures with our own baggage. The experience would be meaningless, however, if our circles did not overlap at all.

Q: What did you do to make your work successful?
A: I have always found self-promotion uninteresting. My earliest break came when David Godine published my first book, Signs of Life, after he had seen my show at Vision Gallery in Boston. The show happened after I dropped off work at the gallery. Vision was a new gallery and I did not know anyone involved. Because of the book I got a lot of letters from people who subsequently became my friends. Also, Ansel Adams invited me to teach at his workshops. Suddenly I had a group of friends to share ideas with, contacts that I had not had before because I did not have a college or university network in my field. Also, a supportive family has been a great help. A real love of doing the work is, however, the key to a career as an artist. No amount of networking or knowing the right people will do any good if the work isn't there.

Q: What equipment do you use?
A: Over a period of thirty years I have worked with many materials and various equipment: view cameras 4x5 up to Polaroid 20x24; 35mm and medium format cameras; color and black and white film; silver prints; Cibachrome prints; Polaroid; Mac computers; digital files; Canon digital cameras, Photoshop; and Epson printers. Despite this large list I have never used a lot of techniques at once. Doing so is okay in school, but if you continue to scatter your technical learning you will spend all your time figuring out technique and be left with no time for ideas.

Q: How did you find your original way of making images?
A: I wish I could give a direct answer to this question, a question that I remember asking, convinced that if I tried hard enough I would find my own style. The more I thought about it the more elusive it seemed. After a while I got more and more absorbed in my work. I forgot about the style thing. Time flew by and I wanted to work all the time. The problem was getting all the other stuff done. Suddenly I had a cohesive group of about thirty prints, the beginning of Signs of Life. This answer and the ‘I can’t understand where it came from’ answer seem most unhelpful, but I think that a lot that happens while we are working on visual images occurs in the realm of visual thinking and it can’t necessarily be translated into the verbal. While working I tend to switch back and forth between a visual-intuitive mode and an editorial-verbal mode. Both modes are important to me but the possibilities and complexities of the visual-intuitive mode seem best for traveling beyond the edge of the map. In other words dive into your work and if there’s a style there it will come out.

Q: What influence did your childhood have on your work?
A: It helps a lot to never feel like grownup when you are making art. I was so much the youngest of four that my parents hired a woman to take care of me. At the time I had no idea how lucky I was. She took me to museums, opera, ballet etc. because that's what she liked to do. Also she read to me a great deal, fairytales in their old unsanitized forms and all of Dickens by the time she left when I was ten.

Q: Which photographers have influenced you?
A: The study of art history plus my early experience made me into a voracious watcher whether I am in a museum, a busy street, the mountains or a junkyard. As a result I have taken in so much visual material that it is hard to say what sources have influenced me. I believe that I have internalized a great deal of visual information. Some of it must be influencing my work, but I can’t explain it verbally. I can mention some visual art and artists who have made me think: Anonymous Jade carvers in Neolithic China, Anonymous Cycladic carvers, Anonymous Han Chinese sculptors and potters, Leonardo da Vinci, Science Book illustrations from the 15th to the 17th century, Giovanni da Paulo, Piero, Chinese painting Sung – Ming dynasties, Giovanna Garzonni, Durer, 17th century Dutch still life, Franz Franken II, Velasquez, Chardin, Goya, Manet, Gaugin, Mattisse, Duchamp, Cornell, Klee, Franz Klein, Beuys, Keiffer, Ann Hamilton, Chen Zhen, and many friends who are contemporary Artists.