Old Dogs

During this period of a picture a day I had started making still lives and sometimes found myself considering found objects as potential backgrounds for the dark interior spaces I was working in. I was looking for indeterminate surfaces to make my teatrino space with, and when I saw this small billboard frame, with its scraped off remnants of posters and announcements, I decided to shoot it and later to print it on old linen tablecloths I have collected. That way I could subdue the color and darken it down into a visual space that would have that indefinite feeling I was looking for.

These ideas were all new to me and have about them decisions about picture making that never entered my mind until I began making still lives. As a working philosophy for my first 50 years, ‘do not touch or arrange anything,‘ was my method and bedrock belief, and I remained true to it, except if I was shooting something commercial which needed direction, and even then I often set something in motion and watched as it spun out of control and became part of real life, and then I could photograph it.

But now that still lives have begun playing a major role in my work I can accept that management and concept, selection and reworking, are all valid means of making a photograph. Even old dogs can learn new tricks.