A lengthy interview in American Photo. Kind of rambling all over the place, but maybe in an interesting way in that I occasionally veer off from my usual talking points. I describe waiting for something to happen on the street while doing the “after” view of Washington Street and West 13th.

You go back here and you stand in the same spot and you think—okay, this looks kind of antiseptic compared to the way it did before. I would just camp out for 15-30 minutes and just kind of watch the flow of what is going on. When you are standing there for a period of time, there is constant flow of people, so the sense is that it’s busy. When you do a little slice of time it can actually seem empty. You only have one half a second and you just catch a few people. A lot of times you have to wait for things to happen to activate the frame a little bit. This is another one — I was there for 15-20 minutes and wasn’t too excited about what I was getting and the suddenly this car comes screeching around the corner with these guys in sunglasses and this vintage top down convertible and it just screamed at me: “This is who we are now. This is what we do now.”

But the best takeaway from the interview, perhaps, is this:

I think the sense that people have of then and now is too easy a way of trying to understand places…. You start to understand that there is some other kind of space between then and now. There is another kind of landscape that is out of time that I’m looking for. I’m looking forward and backward at the same time. I’m not a sentimental kind of photographer. I don’t really go for that kind of thing. I wanted to stay away from doing a nostalgia book. I wanted it to be a book about now and where we have come from.

The whole interview in American Photo is here.