You chose to take many photographs involving religious places or symbols. Why?

A lot of the places I photograph are culturally sacred places. I am attracted to things that are religious and have that iconography. I am not religious. My own thoughts on the matter come from the view that when humans developed the brain capacity to realize our scale and our relationship to life and death, in the scheme of things, we became so scared that we had to mitigate this fear. We have a capacity for rhythm and recognizing patterns and before we knew it we were making altars and creating chants and belief systems; these are the seeds that eventually evolved into the different religions. They come out of our awareness of nature at the deepest level. The ideas of entropy and relationship of nature to the sacred, I am very interested in that. Some of the rock art pictures where you have a canyon wall and marks, even the mark-making process remains a symbol of honoring or desire.

You obviously organized your images in a specific way at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. Was there reasoning to your organization? You put titles in one place, but not near the images. They were clustered at the end of a row of images.

I want the work to be on visual terms. I don’t want your first impression to be a rationale of the title. I like ambiguity which allows viewers to have their own association before I give them my own, or the factual one. This creates the opportunity for a slippage of logic that allows for new ways of putting things together. For example, I will place an image of a pair of hands next to a photograph of a temple. The shift in scale and shift in content is not jarring, but it is more poetic in the way it works. I want to create the opportunity for the viewer to experience a different kind of understanding, rather than practical and realistic logic, even though the individual pictures are quite descriptive and not particularly manipulated.

Did you travel to Palm Springs to oversee the installation?

No. This is where digital photography is useful. I sent a map of thumbnails to the installer. He laid out a sequence, took a digital snapshot and then sent me a .jpg of the wall. We then discussed the layout on the phone. It would have been easier if I had been there, but it worked pretty well as an alternative.

October 13, 1893
BY Linda Connor

You displayed in Palm Springs many images, including some of galaxies photographed on glass plates from the archive of the Lick Observatory. How did these Lick Observatory photos come about?

I had learned when I moved to San Francisco that there was an incredible archive of glass plate negatives at the Lick Observatory. In the early 90s I got a bee in my bonnet to find a way to get access to the observatory archive and make some printing-out prints. The printing out process was a perfect printing technology to use with these historical glass negatives. I made contact prints by placing the glass negatives directly on printing-out paper and leaving them in the sun just outside the archive door. People coming to visit the observatory were always intrigued with what I was doing with all these frames out in the sun. Then I would bring the prints home to my lab to gold tone and fix them. Working this way allowed the negatives to remain safe and sound at the archive.

Tell us more about this paper and why you used it.

All the small, warm-toned prints at the Palm Springs exhibition were on printing-out paper. It has been around since the early 20th century. Printing-out paper mimics albumin prints, but it is already pre-coated, and you can only make contact prints with UV light or in the sun. It is what Eugene Atget used in his work. The image appears through the agency of the sunlight. To make a print you place the negative on top of the paper in a hinged wooden print frame with a glass top. Sunlight comes through the glass and negative to expose the paper. You can open half the frame to see how the print is developing. If it needs more time, you leave it out longer. This is similar to baking cookies, you check on them to make sure they aren’t getting too brown. The length of time to make a print varies with the available sunlight. For example, if in May it takes 32 minutes to make an exposure, on a duller day in November it might take twice as long and the results will vary. It defies technical precision, which is fine with me and my work style. I also learned over the years that it had a capacity to print totally blown-out areas that would have been almost impossible to do in a darkroom. Once the image is exposed onto the paper, it is fugitive and if left in open light will continue to darken. If kept from the light it can hold for months and can be used as a quick proofing method in this state. But to make the prints archival and permanent, they need to be toned with gold chloride, fixed, and properly washed and dried.