What makes portraits intimate (or not)?

I have photographed people from time to time on a freelance assignment. Often it was only a job and the photo, let’s say of a local politician, reflected my disinterest… They were at most snapshots. But a photo like the ones taken here of local shop owners and local workers, Dave Knapp in his paint and glass store, “Izzy” Stone (who likes to call himself a ‘Horologist’), and Michaelangelo Aquaviva (local barber and my barber as a child) — these are people whom I have a history with. We have a connection to one another, and that makes all the dfference.

From the New York Grand Central Terminal to the Hudson Valley and other landscapes, you’ve approached various places in terms of memories and chronology. How do you capture the spirit of a place?

I’ve spent a lot of time in Grand Central Terminal… since I was about five years old, with my grandfather. Over the years, unless you have no soul, the spirt of a place like the Grand Central Terminal takes into itself a part of you. When you photograph these places that are so familiar, I think that your eye frames the image with consideration for all of the past visualization that has occured.

While you’ve mentioned that you “lost” numerous images when working as a TV cameraman because of the job’s demands, do you also think that this background helps you in your present sensitivities towards fleeting images that could be dramatically depicted on a still surface?

Absolutely. I think that the TV camera’s viewfinder was an unconsious “learning tool”… Similar to the small books that you can buy in novelty stores where you have a still image on every page, slightly different than the one from the page before. When you flip the pages, the images move. It is the same thing with the electronic camera in which you can freeze the image. Today, with an inexpensive video camera like the one that we bought our daughter Maya for Christmas, it can be set to shoot video and yet also capture a still frame photo.

What does photography instill in you that roving camera work does not?

With still photography — using film, developing it, and making the photographic print — it is a whole process. The darkroom is a magical place for me. The development of the film is drudgery; once I have a negative, it is about the art of printing, burning and dodging, flashing the print if need be; sometimes with the negative, sometimes without. All of these “manipulations” work towards producing a desired effect in the final image. It’s true that nowadays, all of this can also be done digitally in Photoshop, and some photographers might feel the same about prints done digitally. The darkroom print as it appears faintly in the developer, becoming more and more recognizable as the image photographed, cannot however, be duplicated by any electronic device.