When we moved away from New York city, I started to make a series of photographs out here on Long Island. One day on my wanderings I found a ladder in the woods which had been propped against a tree. The scene reminded me of an image I had once seen by William Henry Fox Talbot. ‘The Haystack’ is a photograph thought to have been taken in 1845. 

 

Talbot was the inventor of the negative positive process and is credited as the father of Photography. He made photographs of his home at Lacock Abbey in England, its pastoral surroundings, and many still life arrangements. His first book of photographs was called “The Pencil of Nature”. 

 

This was the starting point for a series of landscape photographs that I would begin to make. For about eighteen months I explored my new surroundings, looking for interactions between man made construction and nature. 

 

I sought to find a way to reinterpret the landscape photograph, or to recreate it as far as I could in a way that would be remarkably different from anything I had made before. I would travel everywhere with Talbot’s book title at the forefront of my mind. 

 

As I progressed, I began to think more clearly about photography and its relationship with nature, and the ways in which photographers tend to conform when encountering the landscape. I hope that I would be able to move away from my former, more conventional approaches to the subject­. 

 

Everything else, including the format, the decision to make photographs in black and white, and the Weegee-like use of flash, followed in due course.