"Civil Wars, Idiot Winds, and a Few Prayers", 1996

I made my first artist book, "Civil Wars, Idiot Winds and a Few Prayers", 30 years ago from xeroxes of photographs made between 1986 and 1995, mostly in New York City, but also on trips to upstate New York. The city was a different place then. I photographed at times in the headlong rush and human whirlpools of the street, but slowly gravitated toward spaces on the edges of the city, street or various rooms I found myself in. Parades, demonstrations, rituals, and large and small gatherings drew me in. Marathons, baptisms, barbecues, neighborhoods both affluent and working class, and those living on the margins. All type of rituals and existence were what interested me.

The initial catalyst for the book was to donate a work of art for a benefit auction for Storefront for Art and Architecture. I had seen an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art around that time of Francisco Goya's work and had gone back 2 or 3 times. I believe the prints of Los Caprichios where included, and their inky gradations and dreamlike depictions of the absurdities of everyday life became a kind of template to understand how I had come to approach my work, as well as the city and the country I lived in and had photographed for a decade. I began to wonder if making xeroxes of my silver gelatin work prints could evoke a similar tone as Goya's prints by stripping away their sharp photographic quality and let something else emerge. Using a rental Xerox store (pre-Kinkos) around Astor Place, where you could rent your own machine to work on, I could photocopy for hours using the heaviest card stock the machine could handle.

It was the ephemeral quality of an aquatint print I was after. Though the Xerox machine blew out the highlights and crushed the blacks, I liked that it was inherently flawed and the ink smeared sometimes to make it faded, messy and indistinct. It seemed a low-tech solution to evoke the ragged, worn, and occasionally beatific feel of the world I had documented and saw.

Looking back at that time, through the lens of the world we live in now, I realize how much I soaked up then, perhaps too much, and recognize some of the throughlines and differences of then and the warped, desperately hopeful place we find ourselves in today. I had photographed people on the street for a few more years after "Civil Wars", but gradually people began to fall away from the photographs, and I began to be drawn to phenomena of light, shape, form, visual collisions, scrims, collage and mysterious things and places, in both city and rural landscapes. The background moved to the forefront and, perhaps offered a kind of refuge. Yet these views sometimes seemed strangely aligned with a new ubiquity, of ruthless efficiency in the landscape and our general sensibility; of sterile epidemics going mainstream, addiction creation as corporate breakthroughs that run the show. There's still the chance in things despite the malleability, the hand of man, sometimes traces worn down, the devices held in our hands like prayers. It all remains elusive but there is still the suggestion of evidence.

"Civil Wars, idiot Winds and a Few Prayers", 1995. Xeroxes of Silver Gelatin Prints on heavy card stock, binder board cover, hand bound, edition of 5