Red Fence,1987 (opposite & clockwise from top left) Shoe and Ankle, Mexico City,1981 Ring, 1974 Woman Wipes Porch, 1974 Young Girl at Beach, 1977 Teens with Car, 1973
AR: Though you have a very original and signature style, your work is easily grouped with the images of William Eggleston and Steven Shore. Do you consider them your contemporaries? MC: We are in the same time and I am grouped with them because of the color film. My color work has become a lot better known because of the dye transfer portfolio and its exhibition in LA. at the Rose Gallery and from the website of the George Eastman House. I just don’t think we make the same pictures. We are all driven different ways. Different levels of psychological heat. AR: There’s a photograph of yours titled “Young Girl at the Beach.” There is something so beautiful yet sad about her face in that photo. Can you tell me a bit about that image? MC: That picture was taken in Mantoloking, New Jersey. The girl is walking by and sees the camera and is naturally shy and maybe frightened, too, and as she goes by I take the picture. She keeps her head and eyes down and this is a very natural reaction. The steps on the right leading to the dark porch balance this out as if it is all about a trap of some kind. Punishment and guilt are in the air. AR: In addition to images of people, you also focus quite often on architectural details or small glimpses of the smaller worlds around us. For instance your wonderful photo of broken glass.
Is there a distinction between the ways you shoot people vs. inanimate objects? MC: It is much, much safer to photograph an object. There is no harmful personal trespass. Still if you make an object’s picture in the rain or at night or on the run then those elements of atmosphere or disturbance are encountered in some unexplained way. It is hard to imagine sneaking up on a piece of broken glass, but if it is in an abandoned building it is a little like theft and this can give the picture a visible lift. AR: You mentioned that you are a fan of William Klein. Have you ever considered fashion photography? MC: I always thought I could do fashion photography and looked at Vogue for years but it is a thing that is only possible in a city. Plus it is a thing that requires lots of people cooperating and that is just not what I am able to understand. AR: You spoke about how the web contains billions of photographic images. It is almost as though photography is slowly becoming simply a way of exchanging information...somehow devoid of artistic expression. This landscape is so different from when you started taking pictures. In your opinion, how does this affect the way our culture views the art form. Has it influenced the way you approach your recent photography at all?
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MC: I think art in a room with one door is the best way to ‘get it.’ Something like an aesthetic pressure chamber. A white room, with white mattes and white frames, and then in this setting there are a series of pictures that have been made from a selected group of negatives and this is the way to see the point of the photographer’s work. A simple book of the same pictures works in the same way. There is the intimacy of the undistracted first sight. It has the same excitement of the frame in the dark movie theater. The screen is the fixed part of the experience in the same way that the pictures are lined up on the walls or sequenced in the pages. An iPhone photo moving from phone to phone or screen to screen makes a silver print look like a Vermeer. I live in a house with a darkroom and can still get all the materials overnight from New York so the whole digital revolution is only alongside me. I work in exactly the same way but keep a little more distant from the subject. Now I use mostly a 50mm lens. AR: Have you ever shot a photo you regretted? MC: Yes. Once about ten years ago I took a picture of a kid playing with a truck in the dirt in his front yard. I was just walking along the sidewalk. His mother was on the porch, watching at the time, and she called the police. It was Kafka for a year.