Who is your all time favourite artist/photographer? What is it about them that inspires you? 

Impossible question to adequately answer—but— one of my very favorite artists has always said he was "blissfully influenced by everything that he loves" that artist’s name is Emmet Gowin.

If you could meet any artist in the world, past or present, who would it be and why?

Easily it’s Nick Cave, as the breadth of his body of work and the depth and inevitable maturity and wisdom that pours out of that gentleman moves me deeply.  Life is not easy. Longing & loss are not easy. He seems to experience life in the richest, and increasingly humblest way, and tells very meaningful stories about us humans through being a songwriter.  That is somebody that I would really, actually, enjoy sitting down with and having a meaningful conversation. 

Do you prefer physical books/magazines or digital copies? 

Digital things are very convenient however physical books rule my library. I have over 8000 photography books that I've been collecting since 1988.

Can you tell us what projects you are currently working on?

My next book is a book of all landscape photographs that I've taken in the last few years. The title is called "The End Sends Advance Warning” due from Nazraeli Press this Fall. In my last book the inspirational art historian Alexander Nemerov wrote an essay about the images I was making in 2016-2018, and the very first sentence that he wrote was— "The end sends advance warning”. Turns out—he nailed it. The title’s origin is "pre-pandemic” and the images in the new book are made after that cataclysmic situation was piled on top of, or even fueled by the clear unravelling of American Democracy and it’s importance. Don’t forget all the truly fucked-up nonsense that has gone on in the last several years.  Fact is the past few years rattle the notions of what the next section of my life might be like.

With this new work, some made as late as last week, I can see that my pictures do not merely illustrate that title, but in fact they work to frustrate it’s assertion. I feel my latest output leans more towards hopefulness than not, as that is something that I feel we desperately need in this hard world that we're currently living in.

The influence of social media in today’s society, does this make it harder for photographers. Does it add more pressure when trying to create something ‘new’?

I’ve never thought of or even considered the question you asked, so the answer has to be no for me. The one thing I would say is when you start thinking too much about what other people are doing, and your goal is to be the one making something "new”and you let that burden creep into the creative process—with that approach, frankly, you might not ever get there. 

The process for me when making my images is to slowly iterate, and hopefully, slightly innovate and within the area that I am working in—whatever that may be. I have never said to myself "I'm going to make something totally new" because the process of making art for me is very much about the process of small changes and one comes to the understanding that the variation is change itself —which is actually “new". 

What has been the best exhibition you have visited and why? 

The most recent exhibition I saw 2 weeks ago was a Berndt & Hilla Becher exhibit at SFMOMA, traveling from the Met in New York that was curated by Jeff Rosenheim. The reasons that it's one of my favorite recent experiences is because of exactly what I was talking about before in the previous question—clearly the Bechers were not out for anything "new "in anyway whatsoever it seems, and in fact they closed down the scope of what it was they did aas they progressed nd refined it down to a level of hyper consistency that their work was based  on. One could actually say that variation was in some way the most important part of their work to photograph things that were incredibly similar which in photography that is called a typology and when you put like things together (water towers, blast furnaces, worker housing, etc,) the subtle differences between all of them flourish.