It has been suggested that I might have been paying homage to Andreas Gursky in one of my photographs of the Iron Curtain border from 1985. I don’t believe I was familiar with his work at the time, but certainly, I was aware of images by earlier color photographers like Shore and Meyerowitz, and subsequently, Sternfeld. 

The so-called Düsseldorf school of photography was not really on my radar until later. You have to remember, of course, that there was no internet in 1985, and art photography was still not widely published. I was fortunate, however, living in New York, to see lots of exhibitions in both museums and private galleries.  

There were a number of influences that came into play when I began photographing the east/west border in Europe. One of them was Anselm Kiefer whose paintings were first exhibited in New York in 1982. There was one painting in particular, “Nürnberg,” a large landscape showing a field embedded with actual straw, and the skyline of the city in the distance

I don’t know whether I saw Kiefer’s painting before or after I made my photograph of Oebisfelde with its snow-crusted furrows and the distant line of the border wall, guard tower, and church spires. But his landscape work, in general, which evokes the dark history of Central Europe, haunted me throughout my project.