Characters

I went to  some antique fairs during my time in Provence and found myself drawn to these odd forms and sizes. It’s something I don’t really understand very well since I never was a ‘collector’ of things. I have so many photographs from my 50 years of shooting that I never wanted to have ‘things’,  but now that I started making still lives I am surprised by what I find fascinating.

I created a little stage for them to behave on.  I am not really interested in making beautiful arrangements of forms and then lighting them so that each object is a thing of beauty in and of itself; unlike the way that much of the history of the still life plays out.

I like the oddness and the used-up quality of these things whose function, in some cases, is hard to guess. And I had the feeling that my years on the street would tell me what I needed to know in order to play with these new characters. In fact, thinking of them and responding to them from that point of view, as characters, would be the way this new work would develop. We’ll see what happens over time.