John Paul Caponigro There is the problematic notion that photography represents an objective view of reality, a literal truth. Representation has certainly been with us since the earliest images were made but it has never been a greater preoccupation than in recent years. And there is another dominant impulse in art, conjuring up an internal, some would say subjective, truth. This impulse is hardly new either. Even within our relatively recent western tradition there are figures like Sassetta, Bosch, Gruenwald, Blake. This realm has long been the province of painters, though certainly not exclusively. Photography, after a few initial fits and starts, tried to separate itself as an art form by becoming everything painting was not. One of the things I think is fascinating about your work is your marriage of a painterly sensibility with photographic vision, dealing simultaneously with the literal and the subjective, the descriptive and the expressive.

Jerry Uelsmann I wrote a paper years ago called Post-Visualization. At the time, it was controversial. When I think back upon it, it was simply due to the fact that I was the only photographer in an art department situation. All the other media had in process discovery. Photography is the exception. Who's going to begin with a fully conceived canvas? There is a dialog with materials. I think it was osmosis. Being around people who constantly dealt with those issues, they showed me sketches, we'd have coffee together, we talked all the time, it made me think why should this primary moment of truth just have to occur when you clicked the shutter? When you're raised in the purist tradition, as I was, photographically speaking, you're taught that this is what photography does. You make this. It has to be on one negative.

JPC Of course that's been challenged since the beginning of photography (Le Gray, Hill & Adamson, Robinson, Rejlander, Man Ray, Citroen, Ernst, Hoch, Heartfield, Uelsmann). Essentially photography has been a history of "light drawing."

JU There are consciously multiply exposed daguerreotypes - for instance eight views of Edinborough that were done on one plate. I have maintained that Henry Smith, who I studied with, a brilliant guy, a bit crazy, but at Indiana University he maintained that you could have this whole history of photography that would show a manipulative tradition from day one. But because we had so few historians and the first one of any significance was Beaumont they developed this bias. When people are critical of Newhall I'm always bothered. Nothing's wrong with Newhall. We just needed ten more people dealing with all these other issues. He didn't want to address the Bauhaus or all kinds of things that were going on in the art world where there was overlap. And so I think there is a tradition for it. It's just that most people think in terms of the veracity which now is being challenged by the computer. That's the one factor that probably is going to change in the next century. People will begin to be a bit more suspicious. I've always felt that was a plus in my work because the inherent believability is such, in most people, that when they see a photograph of mine there's a dissonance - it's reality but it's not. It creates a kind of tension that I think can suck people into it. I'm always bothered if the first response to the image is, "How did he do it?" I don't mind that being a question, even the second response, but I want that first response to be something like, "God.""Wow.""Disturbing." or "That's my dream." Whatever, but let it be some sort of emotional response rather than something about the craft or technique.

JPC What about the computer?

JU Oh the computer!

JPC You're not using the computer now.

JU Well I think I'm living out the answer. I would honestly say if I felt I had more time I would be working on the computer. But right now part of the reason that I'm not is that my career is so established that I have to spend time reprinting things that people want I want to keep that body of work going. I was introduced to what you can do on the computer. Now when I'm looking at contact sheets occasionally things will come up that I know I can't do in the darkroom but I could do on the computer. So if certain conditions change, I'll retire from teaching probably in one more year, that will give me a little more time, I might start exploring it. I have a fantasy about doing a whole set of Iris prints, I really like the way Iris prints look, that will be based on images I've done that I would make improvements to that I know I can't do in the darkroom. Subtle things.

I certainly don't feel threatened by the computer. It's a tool. It's another way of making marks. Good creative artists will come along. We're in this phase now where a lot of people are overwhelmed by it, feel it's it, feel it's the one thing. It's going to be with us for a long time, but it's going to find it's place. I figured out pretty early, even in the darkroom, having too many options is counter productive to the creative process. The computer is the king of too many options.

JPC Exactly. There is always the danger of doing too much. Knowing when to stop is important.

JU I had learned this by the time that I worked on the Adobe project.

Watching Maggie (Taylor ... his wife) work, it's not quicker, from my point of view.

JPC With the right system it could be. And it certainly would be when you went to make a second print. But I often find most of the time is spent in developing an image not executing it. People can't process information as fast as computers, they take time to make decisions but unlike computers they can actually make them.

JU I have a system that's working for me, in terms of involvement with the imagery.

JPC Absolutely. It's been working for how many years?

JU For a long time, since the early sixties.

And you know, enlargers have never crashed on me. What can I say? There are some plusses.

I never thought so much about cost. And as you mentioned, even Maggie, doing color prints in the darkroom, that's much less costly than getting the Iris prints done. Now that may change with time but that will be a limiting factor for some people.

JPC It is right now.

JU The other thing is the change. These computers have a life expectancy of three years before something comes along that's quite a bit better.

Even very early in photography Henry Smith used to get down on everybody's case about this. I say, "Look if you're comfortable with what you've working with don't change." I see so many people when a new film comes out, finer grain, or paper, whiter whites and blacker blacks, they just keep going on. When you're unhappy with your results then you should explore these other options. In photography, let alone in computers, it's so easy to get caught up.

JPC A.D.Coleman wrote in the introduction to your book Photosynthesis that you had prepared the fertile soil for future computer hybridizations. How do you feel about that?

JU Well that's all after the fact.

JPC You're not the first photomonteur but you are one of the most influential ones.

The number of hybridized photographic images has increased dramatically since the computer has become widely available. You've been employing this aesthetic longer than almost anyone alive, though you were not the first to employ it, you are certainly photography's most prominent practitioner of the genre, so much so that when other artist's employ the method today other people's responses are very often, "That looks like a Uelsmann." I wondered what your response was to that kind of thinking.

JU Well, I must confess to some extent I'm bothered by that. I've had very few students use my techniques because they instantly receive that comment. And it's usually a pejorative comment. What bothers me about that is, if you know enough about photography, there isn't a single image that someone could show you that you couldn't begin by saying, "Well that looks like a ... Caponigro or Friedlander or whatever." You know? And I think that what people fail to realize. Many of these images that I see that involve manipulation are incredibly different than my own, in terms of the content and all kinds of psychological and visual innuendoes that they have, but on some surface level they may have some technical similarity. It's not fair to categorically make that kind of statement. I guess I'm more bothered by the fact that usually people who hear it hear it as a negative term. I'm happy to have people use my techniques. I encourage it. I think that as more and more manipulated work gets out there it's going to be less of a factor. And it should be less of a factor. They should just address the work. And then if someone says, "You're on the same wavelength as ..." You know there are other ways of saying that and that's fine. I would much prefer a more open attitude toward all this.

It is ironic that the computer has generated an audience for my work that wasn't there before. I couldn't have conceived of that. Initially when the computer was first presented to me as a phenomena I saw it as somewhat of a threat. But that quickly dissolved. I've never been secretive about my techniques anyway. I show people how to do it. The technique part of it is not hard. It's coming up with the imagery that is hard. I've always been leery of artists who have some secret thing that no one else can have. In the long run that's not going to fly. These are things that just happen to you. It's like success, it's never been a goal. It happens to you. It's a journey you find yourself on. The phenomenon of the computer has become gradually more and more integrated into my life. It was just a serendipitous thing when Adobe wanted to do the project. Maggie's more involved with it than I. The schools are into it now.

JPC Early on in your career there was practically no one doing the kind of image hybridization that you were doing. I think you even mentioned that you were reacting to straight photographers. You needed to find something to serve your vision. At first some thought you a crackpot; later you were seen as a pioneer and a virtuoso of those techniques. Now some people might think that your methods are archaic. To see that kind of transition must be highly ironic.

JU It's so funny because you can go from being a revolutionary challenging the accepted to being archaic. But, you know it's my vocabulary. One of the things I've felt, a bizarre thing, was that photography had become so camera oriented. I had always liked the darkroom, it was this visual research lab, a place for alchemy to occur. When you look at photo magazines, for every enlarger ad, there's a hundred camera ads. So that's the focus, for the populace too, because many people like to take pictures and they don't have darkrooms. That always was the emphasis for the whole industry. My analogy was a lot of photographers have many cameras and one enlarger and I have one camera and many enlargers. (I actually have more than one camera but I don't have a lot.)

My chief criticism when I was emerging was from photographers, but I didn't get any of that from my art faculty friends here. They were fine with it. But the photographers constantly questioned me. One of the most common responses that used to throw me was, "This is interesting but it's not photography." Wait a minute! I buy everything at the camera store! What do you want to call it? Thirty years ago, particularly in academia, we wanted to define whatever media it was. This is what a photograph should look like and this is what a painting should look like. Then all of that changed.

JPC That's where many of notions about photography came from, that method of approaching a definition with the impulse to analyze and separate ...

JU ... to show what the differences were.

JPC Exactly. And thus legitimize it.

JU It's true. It's crazy. In a way, when the New York Times used to have a page called Camera. Jacob Ashe would say, "There's a show of pictures of roses at the YMCA." It wasn't critical analysis. But the first photographers to be dealt with on the art page in the art section were people like Cartier-Bresson and Edward Weston, where the work was not threatening in any way to painting. Paul Strand, all the classic kind of safe stuff. Now today we have this whole ball of wax mixed together. There's no separation.

JPC I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. Painting felt threatened the minute photography was born. Yet later it was photography that liberated painters from the confines of realism. All of these restrictions and definitions are undergoing a process of disintegration. Technique and materials have been driving this relatively recent revolution too much, placing the emphasis on the wrong areas. Evolution is far too optimistic a word, but there has been a progression of vision. One would hope we could shift our concern to a history of vision and process, not a history of materials and technique.

JU The limits are up here. It's not in the materials. It's endless, the possibilities that exist out there for making marks with whatever you have. You name the system, it is wide open. The limits are truly in how people think about it. We've seen major, major changes in the world of art. It is only natural to accept that thinking is constantly challenged. It goes up and down, some things survive and some things don't. It's part of life's rich pageant.

JPC There is a tremendous psychological dimension to your work, in fact in your work it is more overt than in most photography. I wouldn't say there isn't a psychological dimension to the other photography, we talked about Weston's pepper, there is certainly a psychological dimension to that. But a surreal, I use this word for lack of a more encompassing term, aesthetic does bring into focus ideas of looking in and looking out, of the external world being used as a metaphor for the internal world. Have you studied psychology over the years?

JU I'm in total agreement with everything you just said. The psychological dimension is really an important part of my work. I have always been interested in psychology and one of my close friends was a major figure in humanistic psychology. There was a point at which I really believed in a lot of that. And then there was a point at which some people in Jungian psychology got interested in my work and started talking about the archetypal quality of some of the images. I had this article Bill Parker did back in the late sixties where he dug out all these old paintings that had similar things to what I had done and I was totally unaware of. I remember when he was interviewing me he'd ask me these elaborate questions. Were you thinking about this when you did this? What did you think about first when you did it? Most of the time I said, "I don't know.""Oh great!" he'd respond. It's like the fact that my conscious mind didn't know was somehow the right answer. I'd never been in a situation where not knowing was what they wanted to hear.

I haven't spent a great deal of time studying psychology but I like the dimension of this other sensibility, where the images have a psychological prescence. It's not just a matter of responding to something visual, there's a way in which humanistically you try to participate in whatever that event presents. I like the dream-like sensibility. But I don't like when people say, "Well you're illustrating dreams." I'm not. I don't have a dream and then try and created it. That non-rational aspect of the dream challenges your sense of reality. I like the fact that when we do fall asleep we become mythic and symbolic creatures. We invent levels of reality. I'm always amazed the extent to which people respond to images that I create on that level. This is some kind of emotional thing that they can connect with. The imagery has its own sensibility that a lot of people can connect with. Particularly young people don't have any problem with that stuff. There's a leap of faith element. In other words, in terms of responding, you don't challenge it, "What does this mean?" You go with it.

JPC You're not looking for logical justifications, the work strikes another chord.

JU Right. Once you give up on trying to figure out what it means, it has another kind of meaning. It's the whole thing that Louis Armstrong said when asked, "What does jazz mean?" He'd say, "If you have to ask you're never going to get to know." A lot of times people ask me to tell them what it means, like I'm going to give them some little secret. I think my art is very much a part of a tradition, yours is too, where it's really directed towards the inventive consciousness not just the perceptive consciousness of seeing what's there. They are called upon to participate in it if they are going to have any authentic experience with it. A lot of contemporary art functions in that way and it's the extent to which it pulls it off that lets them really go with it. I don't have any hidden agenda really. Some of the images I can connect to in specific ways, they have meaning for me, but whether other people get that same meaning is not a concern that I have. They should just respond to these things.

JPC And you don't mind when they come up with responses that differ from yours?

JU No. Sometimes it's really insightful to hear the way other people respond. And that leads to the Jungian thing.

JPC The Jungian notion would hope that we would all come up with a similar level. This other interactive element challenges that and suggests that the variety we get can be equally important. A specific individual content can be just as revealing to the participant as a cultural or universal one, and serves an important function. I'm very cautious about explaining my images to someone. I only do it if I feel they will be able to sustain their original impressions and can simply add mine to the ongoing dialog that occurs between the viewer and the subject. People will come up and ask me what is it. If I tell them it's ice, they often quickly dismiss the image. But if I withhold that information mystery persists and a richer experience is had by all.

JU I agree. I've had that same experience. I try, whenever I can, to at least give some more cryptic or poetic response. I don't like the idea that people think that art is somehow dumb. We do think about these things. You can provide clues. But I don't want to present it like, "This is the answer. This is what that one's about, now lets move onto the next." Art history does a lot of naming. If you have to study art, that's the thing that can screw you up, because you get to a point where you're having to learn dates and names and styles and all that kind of stuff. And so you begin to think that's the appropriate response to a painting. You're giving all this information and you're not really responding.

JPC The difference between reciting what you have learned and expressing what you personally know. The process of living is about your own personal experience and the truth that brings. We are all witnesses to different experience.

JU I'm constantly struggling to find a language that can at least begin to give people some way of being more responsive to the work if they realize there are other qualities that I feel are there. If you read most of the journals dealing with contemporary art you would think that there is no art being done today that has spiritual qualities. One of the main reasons is it's much more difficult to write about, either the psychological or spiritual dimension of art. It's easier to write about work dealing with aids, or incest, or feminism, whatever the issues that have an agenda that are out there. There's nothing wrong with that kind of work. But I think the writers, the critics find that easier to deal with.

JPC Of course. It's safer, more politically correct, more widely understood, with clearer answers. In a pluralistic society how do we engage spirituality publicly?

JU I maintain, and there have been a few books, that a part of the art scene is very much that work that has a poetic sensibility to it. I felt back in the fifties, even in the sixties, there was some effort to deal with poetic imagery. As we got into more politically correct art it was cast by the wayside.

Weston had this thing years ago, "When I was young you see, in my early thirties, I defined art as outer expression of inner growth. But I can't define art any better today. My work has changed. It is not something to be learned apart, from books and rules. It is a living thing which depends on the whole participation. As we grow in life so we grow in art. Each of us in his own way." Amen. Obviously that meant so much to me at one time that I memorized it. This modernist, romantic, poetic definition of art still works for me. I would modify it somewhat, but I still basically believe it.

JPC What of the role of humor?

JU Well, you know, I really think it’s a difficult question because I don’t want to pretend that humor isn’t a part of my life cause I really, I mean, it’s a major quality I like in people when they have a sense of humor. And I feel that you know in my own work there’s such a broad range, that while I do make images that have that element, and I would like to keep doing that, I don’t want people to, at the expense of images that don’t have that quality, pretend that well, it’s all like one big joke. I see humor as something beyond a joke. The thing I mentioned, the way in which a lot of the work I do relates to some humor is that you have that unexpected thing happen, that’s what, you know, jokes are about. You tell the story, you build the pattern, and there’s this little twist that we have sort of visually that happens, you know, sometimes. But a lot of the, I mean, the humor can be at so many different levels. You can comment on things through humor and people are more willing to kind of deal with it.

JPC You can deal with difficult subjects more easily.

JU Yeah. You know, I was reminded when, I thought of this after you left last night, when I traded with your dad for pictures, like I wanted his classic image, he was probably fed up with printing that sucker, but he wanted from me The Flamingos Visit Yosemite. And I thought, “Of all the pictures.” This is strange. (laughter) But we were in Yosemite at the time and he thought it was kind of clever or whatever. So we traded that. But that’s a good example of, you know, it’s a humorous kind of picture. And it’s subtle, because a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily know. Most people would know that flamingos aren’t in Yosemite.

JPC It’s a fairly seemless image.

JU Yeah. Yeah. And I’ll continue to do it. I don’t, I really don’t like to think about how the image is going to function so much so much when I’m generating it. You just get involved with it, constructing this image. There’s all that kind of confusion and self-doubt and sometimes the technical concerns of can I do this, can I get these things to integrate and blend, they seem to be dominating my conscious mind. At the same time there’s a point at which you back off and ask, “What is this about?” And it’s all that, I don’t know, how can I say it, it’s like this intense self-dialog that happens during that process. And part of the craft thing I feel is has always been a bit of a savior for me because if you get too caught up in intellectually there is that problem of talking yourself out of so many things that might potentially produce something.

JPC You can deconstruct anything.

JU Yeah, and that’s one of the current things in contemporary art, as you well know.

JPC It was the modernists weapon against tradition and now it’s what’s tearing moderninsm apart.

JU Right. Going for it. Go for the throat. So I, I mean, I feel blessed that, well, several things happened at one point, and I can actually remember the moment when I was a student at RIT and I went to the Eastman House and it had just opened as a museum and they had just hired Beaumont Newhall. They had a show up, and for the first time, I saw original 8x10 contact prints by Weston and Wynne Bullock, and Ansel Adams may have been in the show, I’m not sure. I do remember being, looking at these images and saying, “Boy that’s the way I want mint to look; that tonal range, the fidelity, the sharpness. And I was very impressed with both Weston and Bullock, you know, Wynne had that sort of psychological dimension that I felt rapport with where there was this, you know, symbolic implication of the setup situation, the figures, that’s something at the time I didn’t deal with. But I did in fact later. But it’s sort of nice in a way when you have a particular technical form that you admire. I mean I can honestly say I could see images where you don’t have that full tonal range. But I’ve bought into that. So that criteria is very easy for me to apply the image must have this, this, this and this. But then beyond that, it’s a matter of like you know, you have to deal with the overall image itself and how it’s going to impact. Well, how you feel it’s functioning in terms of you know either personal content, authenticity, yourself, are you imitating.... As you get older, I mean at mid-career, there are some plusses and minuses. I mean the plusses are that I’m like, you know, Maggie who works very hard at what she does, and to get the work out, I don’t have any problem getting the show. I have more than I can possibly handle, really. So that, and there’s an established audience and all that. And there’s, God knows, forty years of you know personal visual mythology. But the downside is of course with all that behind you the easiest thing to fall into is imitating yourself. And in real life, of course, you need so many sort of stock responses to just survive and yet every time someone says “Good morning.” you’ve got to have a creative answer. It would be awkward. But we do it, even in terms of people having opinions on this and on that and they sort of recite their belief system at that time. But when you get involved in art, I mean I’m really into the whole modernist aesthetic where I want that to be a unique thing that happens and it’s hard to break from when you’ve got yourself.... I mean, I’ve found myself actually almost redoing an exact image I did ten years earlier, a slight variation. “Whoa, wait a minute, this is familiar.” You get caught up, I guess. This has worked before, you’re frustrated, and you try it.

JPC Early in your career you’re sorting out your influences and trying not to imitate other people. Later in your career you’re trying not to imitate yourself.
JU Yeah. I don’t think you can help that. I think there’s a point at which even, it’s interesting, like imitation has a pejorative quality; inspiration, like you’re inspired by something, that’s a more positive spin on that sort of thing. And a lot of times you just have to work through those things. I know when I first went to Yosemite, my god, you know, I’d only known of this place through Ansel’s photographs. Everywhere you looked, my God, the mountains are calling down, “Take my picture.”

JPC And everywhere there are tripod marks.

JU Right. That’s the whole joke, find his tripod holes. And my thought was, God, I could pick up a postcard and identify it instantly, because it is a little overwhelming. And for awhile, it really hung me up because I thought, “I’m not going to take those pictures.” Then there’s a point at which I just took them. It’s like I’m not going to matt them and try to sell them and pretend I’m Ansell Adams, but he taught me to see some of these things and so you do it and it’s part of you and then you move on. Then you can move on from there. Otherwise you keep looking back over your shoulder. So I did a lot of the traditional kinds of things, and it was only after a point that I could move, you know, in a different direction or move somewhere from that. And that’s been true when I, a few times I’ve done major retrospective shows. I did one about three years ago here at the University that traveled to Florida and had 200 prints and when we went back to some of the really early work, like I was, I had work that looked like Harry Callahan, I had work that looked like a Walter Evans. I had work that you name the photographer and I was like there was a point when I was saying “Well I’ll see how this feels. Try on this hat. Eventually, out of it all, hopefully, you find a voice. But there’s no other way. You’ve got to do that. Find your path.

JPC We’ve brought up two things. Humor often gets us to consider things that we’re not comfortable considering; very often the sexual, somtimes the scatological, all the things that are outside our normal bounds of comfort. In many ways that’s part of the artistic process as well, going beyond our regular confines. I think it also helps the work avoid becoming too stiff or self-conscious. It’s great to have a sense of humor, it keeps things lively.

JU Right. I mean, as a person, humor is a very important part of my life. As an image maker, it’s because of who I am sometimes it gets in there, but it’s not always in there. It can be a part of it.

JPC Sometimes it’s very much there.

JU Yeah. I’ve always admired art, the challenges one’s sense of reality, that’s the bottom line for me. I don’t want to in any way try to replicate what we perceive. I feel very much a part of that sort of modernist tradition. And I think people who work in even the so-called “straight”approach photography, oh my God, I mean that’s transformation. You could, even if you found the tripod holes where, you know, they set their cameras, Weston, you couldn’t make those pictures. It’s going to be different, because of all kinds of factors. And it occurs to varying degrees. I’ve always been very comfortable with that idea that I could alter reality in ways that were more meaningful to me, and still be dealing with, you know, actual subject matter. This is the area where it’s most difficult to talk about, like I’m never included in shows dealing with the landscape. And I feel very strongly that my images deal with the landscape in a very direct way. It’s not the one that’s literally perceived, but it embraces, I hope, my better images that deal with the landscape, embrace some of the sort of the source of my experience of that landscape. It’s like a way in which I feel and am responding to that is carried within that imagery and it’s conceptually sort of difficult to talk about that, but I find when most people, when they’re building a landscape show, they think truly in terms of how these images reflect whatever their perception would be of the landscape, and usually it’s in a very traditional, straight real world, if you manipulate it in some way and that’s, I don’t think that’s true. I got sidetracked there.

JPC That’s okay. We’ll come right back on track. I think one of the things we’re skirting around there is the notion that photography represents an objective view of reality, a more literal truth. That ***** truth is hardly a modern thing. It’s been around since the cave. Look at Bosch or Blake, it’s been with us the whole time. Photography tried to separate itself as an art form at a certain point by becoming everything the painting wasn’t. One of the things I think is fascinating about your work is your marrying a painterly sensibility with photographic vision. I think the two are quite different in interesting ways and quite similar in others. You were right when we were looking at photographs of the same subject, same tripod marks, they’re going to come out different. The notion that dad and I can stand in the field side by side and see completely different proportions on the ground glass or have an entirely focus. That’s one thing, personal vision. You can’t get away from that. We can struggle with the notion of an objective eye of the camera but in many ways it’s just not so. But there’s also what you’re dealing with, the notion of constructing an image afterwards or through an internal vision.

JU Well, I mean, I wrote a paper years ago called Post-Visualization. But, and at the time, it was controversial, and whatever, but in reality when I think back upon it, it was simply due to the fact that I was the only photographer in an art department situation and all other media have in process discovery. It’s the exception. Who’s going to begin with a fully conceived canvas? There is a dialog with materials. I think in some almost osmosis or whatever kind of way, being around people who constantly dealt with those issues, showed me sketches, we’d have coffee together, we’re talking all the time, made me think well why should this primary moment of truth just have to occur when you clicked the shutter? Then you become the craftsman. Well you do change the image somewhat in the darkroom, but that’s where the initial commitment was still being made. There were all kinds of little factors that kicked in to do that. I think partly it had to do with the fact that when you’re raised in the purist tradition, as I was photographically speaking, you’re sort of taught that this is what photography does. You make this. It has to be on one negative.

JPC Of course that’s been challenged since the begining of photography (Hills Brothers, Robinson, Reyjlander, Citroen, Ernst, Hoch, Heartfield, Man Ray, Callahan, Uelsmann). Photography has been essentially a history of “light drawing.”

JU We talked very briefly about this before, at dinner or something, There are consciously multiply exposed daguerrotypes ... eight views of Edinborough that were done on one plate, and I have maintained that Henry Smith, who I studied with, a brilliant guy, a bit crazy, but at Indiana University he maintained that you could have this whole history of photography that would show a manipulative tradition from day one. But because we had so few historians and the first one of any significance was Beaumont they developed ... when people are critical of Newhall I’m always bothered by that, nothing’s wrong with Newhall we just needed ten more people dealing with all these other issues but he didn’t want to address the Bauhaus or all kinds of things that were still going on in the art world where there was overlap ... and so I think there is a tradition for it. It’s just that most people think in terms of the veracity and all that which now is being challenged by the computer in such a way that that’s the one factor that probably is going to change in the next century. People will begin to be a bit more suspicious. I’ve always felt that was a plus in my work because the inherent believability is such in most people that when they see a photograph of mine there’s that sort of dissonance of it’s reality but it’s not. It creates a kind of tension that I think can suck people into it. Another thing, I usually say this in lecture, I’m just rambling because it’s coming to me, but I’m always bothered if the first response to the image is, “How did he do it?” I don’t mind that being a question, even the second response, but I want that first response to be something like, “God.””Wow.””Disturbing.” or “That’s my dream.” Whatever, but let it be some sort of emotional response rather than something about the craft or technique. But many photographers focus on the technique. That seems to be the thing they want to celebrate or be proud of. The technique and the image are wedded, the two have to be together. You can have the perfect print without a lot of content. Or the reverse, a lot of art students make interesting stuff but they haven’t worked out their craft and that’s the other thing that bothers me. Their mumbling these things but they’ve got good ideas.

JPC Those are the two poles of creating any piece of art. You need enough technique to serve the vision but if technique usurps or replaces the vision then you’re in trouble. A lot of people criticize Cartier-Bresson for not having made his own prints. The images aren’t so much about technique as they are about vision. Its still great work.

JU No I agree. I used to joke, “God, if Bresson can have a printer, why can’t I have a shooter?”

JPC That’s very funny. And yet yesterday you were talking about how important it was for you to have gone and experienced all the images even though you wondered what it would be like to start today with all the stock photography available.

JU Belive me, I love to photograph. I haven’t thought it all through. One day I drove over to Saint Augustine, they replaced an arch, I was by myself and I photographed pretty much all day. I had shot ten rolls. As I was driving back, I thought you know the amount of time the shutter was actually open on the camera was a total of less than two seconds, or one second even. And you think, “Now wait a minute, what the fuck is going on?” What it is, at one basic level the camera just gives you permission to interact in an authentic way. Whether it be a rock, its like “I love you rock.” Or a tree or whatever. It’s again a little difficult to talk about because it sounds simplistic on one hand but it’s like permission to just be honest with that moment, whatever it is. Plus the freedom of photography is such that once you do click the shutter, this whole emotional thing happens, you then move on to some other thing (JPC It liberates you from the task of mechanical rendering.) That’s the experiential quality that is important to me. The other thing that happens to me (JPC I agree, one of the most exciting things about photography for me is the discipline and the opportunity of going out and seeing the world in a concentrated way. Looking.) I’ve realized, this took me years, some of these things seems so simple now, that many images were just saying truly, “I love you rock.” Some you look at the negative and say, “Wow.” And when you print it, nothing. There’s a filtering down process, but it’s all part of the visual diary of your life as you work out there, being a person who makes marks on paper with light or whatever you use. I kind of accept all that. I gained a tremendous sense of freedom once I realized I didn’t have to complete that image. That was my cross to bear. I had a hell of a time with that because I would start thinking about it and it was really difficult and I would talk myself out of things and get all twisted. Now its sort of, its not that you can’t not think, and when I take a picture I certainly compose as best I can, I try to see this completed image but I feel free to say, “This might make an interesting foreground.” or “I just like the quality of light.” So I really collect. I don’t have any problem shooting film. That’s one of the easiest things for me to do. And later I’ll look at it and sometimes think, “Goc, why did I take that?” And others I think, “God, I could use that.” And move on from there.

JPC I had a friend come over for dinner one night. Dad was there and they hadn’t met. My friend walks in and introduces himself to dad with the statement, “You’re a photographer aren’t you? God I’d love to have your job. All those one hundred and twenty fifths of a second, what does that add up to? A twenty minute career?” He said it with a perfectly straight face. Dad couldn’t believe it. It was one of the few times I’ve seen dad taken aback and there was a five second stand off. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And then they both cracked up.

JU This is a little different than that, I actually built a whole lecture around this. This is a large university and back in the late ‘60’s a few of us in the art department were bothered by the fact that we knew there were other interesting people there but how do you meet them on a campus this big. And a group was formed, I was one of the founding members, called Arts and Civilizations Seminars. A guy from philosophy, a very good friend of mine in psychology, a few people from the sciences, there were about fifteen of us. We’d get together once a month and someone would give a twenty minute talk about something they were passionate about in lay terms and then we would discuss it and ask questions. It was good because they were creative and intelligent people, but what do you know about some of these other disciplines. It was fun. This went on for years, it’s just kind of faltered in these past few years. But ten years ago I’m at one of these things and one guy comes up to me and says, “God, you’re an artist you are so lucky.” And then the same evening another guy comes up and says, “Boy you guys know where it’s at.” There were a few comments like this and I thought, “God these people don’t have a clue what it’s like to really be an artist. What I do. So I volunteered two months later to try and speak authentically about what it’s like to be an artist. And for the first time ever in my career I dug out every print that I tried that year, I had saved one and put it in a box, and I made slides. I now had this lecture, which my students like, which I hate to give, but where I show truly a hundred and a hundred and eighty images and then I show the ones that made it at the end of the year and it’s always ten percent or less. For me the hard part was accepting that there is all this other stuff that goes on. You can’t just make good images. It’s like you can’t just be profound. But I felt good doing it because I thought that people had bought into all these myths about artists that we somehow have it easy or you just sit around and inspiration comes. If they only knew the kind of struggle that went on and the tremendous self-doubt that is part of it. You set yourself up. I to this day have major problems personally, one the workaholic thing. It’s really hard for me to relax. Going on some of these trips where I’ve been invited the camera makes that somewhat of a working vacation. I can accept that and that’s the closest I come.

JPC It’s a good thing your wife is a photographer.

JU Well the thing is Maggie (Taylor) does not take pictures like that. She’ll take some snapshots but the one thing she is good at is, I always think this is a Yale thing, she researches. We’re going to Prague and she’s on the internet and she gets all this information. When we go she has worked out this incredibly elaborate agendas, where things are and what we can do. She’s reasonably tolerant. Plus now that I use cameras with automatic exposure and I try to carry the smallest tripod I can. I try to be a little bit speedy in doing this. Although if we come to certain places ... I think I photographed in Wales rocks that your dad photographed. When we got to this place, God, it was truly magical. It was a 60’s sort of thing. Energy spots on the earth. We were alone there for a couple of hours. Sheep fields and all that. And she was comfortable with that. But there is sometimes that kind of dialog. But the other thing, talk about major processes, every year I set myself up, “I want to do more work and I want to do better work.” Whatever the hell that means but I want the line to keep growing. And I know enough about my history because I’ve got all these photographs. Some years I produce images that have lasted more than others. You can’t set yourself up that way, yet we’re so conditioned to think in terms of that continual line that goes up and up, that you get better and better and better. I always feel frustrated because I have this one year mentality. So it’s like once 1997 is here I think, “I don’t have any work from 1997! I’ve got to do something!

JPC Buy low sell high. The stock prices have always got to be going up. We’re so obsessed with growth we often forget to ask the question, “Is it sustainable growth?” We rarely ask the question, “What price will we have to pay to support it?” Or, ”Do such high standards need to be eclipsed or maintained?”

JU It’s a stupid way of being. I could intellectually play with the whole thing but at the same time I truly feel, “You’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to make some new work.”

JPC Do you also feel pressure to break new ground?

JU Yeah. I like the idea that you challenge the limits of your peak. And in most areas of art, that whole reinvestigation of the means, what it can do, occurred much earlier. Painting is no longer just oil on canvas. This kind of thing. This whole free investigation. And I’ve always felt I was a part of that. But at the same time I realized that I was still hung up on the West Coast Tradition of the fine print. And I’ll carry that to my grave. That’s the way I want to work. But I thought visually I liked the idea of pushing the envelope a little. Sometimes it’s tiny break throughs. What I get upset with is people, and I’ve had some of the worst reviews in my life as I get older, thy’ll do like, well I’ll have a show in New York and the critics there basically don’t like my work so if they do deal with it they’ll sometimes be polite and say, “He’s still doing the same thing.” Well I think my work has grown and changed. I think my work is more spiritual. Subtle things. But they’re just looking at the technique; if it’s using more than tone negative I’m doing the same thing. It bothers me that they can’t pay enough attention to those images to see that there’s at least some change occurring. Whether they analyze that as growth or not is another thing. But I think it gets more subtle. It’s like the tree analogy, I may be sending out more branches but I’m not developing a new root system. I’m not going to wake up with a different head on my shoulders and say, “I’m going to do straight photography.”

JPC We’ve inherited a notion of growth which generally involves revolution. This perpetuates the notion that in order to grow one has to go through entirely new cycles. That leaves less time for maturity to take hold. Revolution doesn’t have a lot to do with growth, generally it entails tearing down the old to clear a space for the new. True growth is much more akin to an oriental tradition of going deeper. I wish we did value that more. Because we’re so obsessed with the external appearances of things it is easy to think that it’s all the same. But that’s not what the picture is about. It is very hard to talk about what the picture is ultimately about or what inspiration is or what the spirit of the work is. It’s usually something ephemeral, outside the grasp of words. Something best left unsaid, because the minute you put a label on it. It limits it. (And since we rely more and more on critics to explain a work with words, rather than frame and introduction we usually get limited answers.)

JU I agree with that. At the same time I’m constantly struggling to find a language that can at least begin to give people some way of being more responsive to the work if they realize there are other qualities that I feel are there. I find it interesting, I think a lot of the post-modernist stuff that is going on today, a lot of the writing on art today, avoids, if you read most of the journals dealing with contemporary art, you would think that there is no art being done today that has spiritual qualities. One of the main reasons is it’s much more difficult to write about, either the psychological or spiritual dimension of art. It’s easier to write about this work is dealing with aids, or incest, or feminism, whatever the issues that have an agenda that are out there. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of work. But I think the writers, the critics find that easier to deal with.

JPC Of course. It’s safer, more politically correct, more widely understood, with clearer answers. In a pluralistic society how do we deal with spirituality?

JU I maintain, and there have been a few books, that a part of the art scene is very much that work that has a poetic sensibility to it, and I don’t know if it will ever ... I felt back in the fifties even in the sixties, there was some effort to deal with the poetic imagery. As we got into the more politically correct centered art it was cast by the wayside.

JPC The media has lent the focus of their intentions to something else. There are many people still working in the other way and I think it is some of the strongest work produced. If you use political manifestos to generate art you come up with something that is contrived. I don’t think it will endure in any sense other than it occupies a certain historical niche because it obsessed a certain decade or century.

JU I totally agree with that. I remember years ago we had a faculty member who dealt with all these pictures, images that dealt with Watergate. Those images today people wouldn’t recognize the people who were in the paintings. Whereas if you deal with man’s inhumanity to man or some broader based thing that’s there. I did a thing two years ago for our government, because of the economy being what it was at this time in America and I doing what I do, you couldn’t be a fine art photographer in a lot of other places. Anyway, I had a show that travelled in India through the U.S. Information Agency. I sent them all the work. No money involved. And they travelled it. The interesting thing to me is they kept this thing where people wrote responses. I was overwhelmed! How come I can’t get reviews like that in this country? That’s not the point I wanted to make, the point was if you deal with some of these deep seated, going inside kinds of issues there are ways in which it really connects with a broader base of humanity. And the people, I teach the people who do public art, they think they’re reaching some public but they’re not. They take these esoteric issues and ten years from now and their pictures won’t mean anything. And I tried to impress upon them that if you deal with other issues that have a far broader base, are deeper seated, in humanity ... I don’t have the language to express it ...

JPC You’re making the distinction between speaking on a culturally specific level and a more universal level. For a long time you’ve been interested in Jungian psychology and the notion of the archetype, something that touches a deeper root to a widely shared level of human experience. Despite our individual and cultural differences, certain things remain constant and we share a pool of experience we can draw from as a result. As we move away from the universal towards the culturally specific and the individually specific fewer avenues of access are left. Relevance can become difficult to find. At the same time if one appropriates someone elses archetypes without personal experience of the contents they point to one runs the risk of doing superficial work. The real trick is relating one to the other in a meaningful way.

JU A lot of images, and I’ll be struck by lightning for saying this, but they really need outside inspiration. So they have art that is essentially outer directed and they find a cause and that gives the value to it. And so you can deal with certain issues and then the work has this ascribed value to it.

JPC This kind of work will also generate press easily because the issues involved are generally hot topics and it’s sensational.

JU And some of the people, I have to say, that do this kind of work do produce magnificent imagery. But there’s a large number that don’t but it’s politically correct and they get a profile for doing it. When I first came to the south, and I was still working in a variety of styles I was trying to do documentary stuff at the same time Minor White had had an influence with more poetic work, I hadn’t really found my voice. Well I thought, “I’m going to deal with racial issues. We’re still segregated down here and I’d been raised in inner city Detroit. I’d gone to schools that were predominantly black.” So I didn’t have any fear and I started photographing. A couple of them had been published. There was a point at which after a while, and I would give these people photographs, and I knew other people on campus that were trying to similar things, I began to realize what I was doing if anything had an exploitive quality to it. I take these pictures of these people come home and have a nice dinner and what do I do? I try to sell them or show them? I just felt there was this strong myth that by photographing these people I was helping them. Part of me felt like maybe I was helping them but part of me felt like maybe I was using them in some other way. I soon realized that if I wanted to help the causes it was far more effective for me to be there as a body if they wanted to protest something. Or if I could help economically in any way. I get upset when people say I’m not dealing with causes. Fuck those people. I give photographs to auctions for aids, etc. In a very direct and concrete way I’m helping with a lot of social issues even though my photographs don’t necessarily address those. The fact that they have value can really help those issues. I’m not totally against that kind of photography but it does to me become a bit exploitive.

JPC You mentioned that there was work done in this vein that you did respond to. We don’t have to mention names or specific images, but I am wondering about certain kinds of qualitites you might point to.

JU Well, like the Salgado stuff is really dramatic. But I’ll tell you an interesting thing, these guys carrying the dirt out of the mines. Oh God. But then recently we had an artist who does conceptual pieces that deal with issues and he’s photographed in South America too. He talked about those pictures and said, “You know, these people are really happy to have that job. The unemployed people are getting an opportunity to haul this dirt out and they can make so much money and then go back to their families.

JPC As long as they don’t get hurt or killed.

JU Right. The point is initially it was presented as some totally terrible thing and then it was modified. But I do like that kind of work.

JPC There are echoes of a more universal nature in that work.

JU I really have a broad based appreciation for photography. Even people who are dealing from a somewhat more traditional approach to landscape. Bill Neil and Chris Burkett, people who really work in a pictorial tradition, I admire those people. But it is harder than hell to take those kind of pictures. I mean it’s not the kind of work that I necessarily want to make but to make them where they rise above the crop is hard.

JPC It is difficult to be seen as an individual who isn’t repeating the successes of the past.

JU I have a broad based appreciation for photography.

JPC What about the computer?

JU Oh the computer!

JPC You’re not using the computer now.

JU Well I think I’m living out the answer. I would honestly say if I felt I had more time somehow, that the days were longer, I would be working on the computer. But right now part of the reason that I’m not is that my other career is so established that you know I have to spend time reprinting things that people want and at the same time I want to keep that body of work going but once I was introduced to what you can do on the computer I do have this little bug in my brain now when I’m looking at contact sheets, occassionally things will come up that I know I can’t do this in the darkroom but I could do it on the computer. So if certain conditions change, I’ll retire from teaching probably in one more year, that will give me a little more time. I might start exploring it. Because I have a fantasy about doing a whole set of Iris prints that will be based on images I’ve done that I would make improvements that I know I can’t do in the darkroom. Subtle things. I really like the way Iris prints look. So I certainly don’t feel threatened by computers. It’s a tool. It’s another way of making marks. Good creative artists come along. We’re in this phase now where a lot of people are overwhelmed by it feel it’s it, feel it’s the one thing. Its going to find it’s niche, it’s going to be with us for a long time, but it’s going to find it’s place. And the people who really learn to work with it, I figured out pretty early, even in the darkroom having too many options is counter productive to the creative process. The computer is the king of too many options.

JPC Exactly. There is always the danger of doing too much. Knowing when to stop is important.

JU I have learned this by the time that I worked on the Adobe project and watching Maggie work, it’s not quicker. From my point of view.

JPC With the right system it could be. And certainly when you went to make a second print.

JU Just in terms of involvment with the imagery, I have a system that’s working for me.

JPC Absolutely. It’s been working for how many years?

JU For a long time, since the early sixties. And you know, enlargers have never crashed on me. What can I say? There are some plusses. My analogy was a lot of photographers have many cameras and one enlarger and I have one camera and many enlargers. I actually have more than one camera but I don’t have a lot. I never thought so much about cost. And as you mentioned it, even Maggie, doing color prints in the darkroom, that’s much less costly than getting the Iris inkjet prints done. Now that may change with time but that will be a limiting factor for some people.

JPC It is right now.

JU The other thing is the change. These computers have a life expectancy of three years before something comes along that’s quite a bit better. Even very early in photography Henry Smith used to get down on everybody’s case about this. I said look if you’re comfortable with what you’ve working with don’t change. I see so many people when a new film comes out, finer grain, or paper, whiter whites and blacker blacks, they just keep going on. When you’re unhappy with your results then you should explore these other options. In photography, let alone in computers, it’s so easy to get caught up. Workshops are full of these kind of people. They know about every thing.

JPC Satellite tracking on every focal plane.

JU Well I always thought that if you could afford a Hasselblad camera there should be some gaurantee that you’ll make at least hundred good pictures every year.

JPC It comes down to who’s using the equipment. There has been some wonderful work done with homemade pinhole cameras.

JU Now they all use the Holga. I get on the case of some graduate students, it’s become a form, but I find it so bizarre. They take the twenty dollar camera then they make these magnificent precious prints. What about the twenty dollar enlarger? I know why they like it. The freedom. You’re not worrying about f-stops and shutter speeds or any of this technical stuff. You just go with it and sometimes it’s a freeing experience but you do end up with a very precious prints.

JPC It’s hard to balance technique with putting it in the service of something. It’s easy to get wrapped up in giving all to technique. When that happens you wonder who’s the accessory the camera or the photographer?

JU Well, technique is so teachable. I think that’s why people like the Zone System.

JPC It’s like a scientific equation; you can actually solve it.

JU Yeah. When you deal with trying to have someone discover their unique imagery that is authentic to them, that’s more difficult.

JPC Yeah. Now we need to plot poetry on an x y axis.

JU You really have to, this is the difference between workshops and graduate school, where you have fewer people for a longer period of time. They have to be somewhat self-revealing. I want my students to be as authentic as they can be, so I have to know what some of their concerns are and try and get them to articulate that. And I don’t want it to be reading the latest art theory and coming up with this elaborate superstructure and have all these buzz words. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you believe in? Try to force those kinds of issues. In the long run that’s going to serve them better. And it’s not like it’s all within but there is a point at which you do hook into their world, they’re changing and they can still be open to the possibilities. From my point of view as a teacher, it’s a matter of, when I’m in the university I try and give a hundred percent of my attention to what’s going on there. And I hear what they’re saying and I look and I see where these things don’t quite fit. Just be the protagonist to hopefully let them have some sense of what’s going on.

JPC I try to get my students to solve their own problems. I’m much less interested in them knowing all the key commands in Photoshop, or the latest power tip; I’m much more interested in them being exposed to the foundational material and putting that in pespective. Then we can discuss how to solve the problem creatively. And even ask the question, to what end? That’s always the hardest question.

JPC Let’s finish up the computer. A.D.Coleman wrote in the introduction to your book Photosynthesis that you had prepared the fertile soil for future computer hybridizations. How do you feel about that?

JU Well that’s all after the fact.

JPC It is. You’re not the first photomonteur but you may be one the most influential ones.

JU It is ironic that the computer has generated an audience for my work that wasn’t there before. I couldn’t have conceived of that. Initially when the computer was first presented to me as a phenomena I saw it as somewhat of a threat. But that quickly dissolved. I’ve never been secretive about my techniques anyway. I show people how to do it. The technique part of it is not hard. It’s coming up with the imagery that is hard. I’ve always been leery of artists who have some secret thing that no one else can have. That’s just such bullshit. In the long run that’s not going to fly. These are things that just happen to you. It’s like success, it’s never been a goal. It happens to you. It’s a journey you find yourself on. The phenomenon of the computer has become gradually more and more integrated into my life. It was just a serendipitious thing when Adobe wanted to do the project. Maggie’s more involved with it than I. The schools are into it now.

JPC That’s looking at it from a broader sociological perspective. Early on in your career there was practically no one doing the kind of image hybridization that you were doing. I think you’d even mentioned that you were reacting to the straigh photographers, it’s that you needed to find something to serve your vision. At first some thought you a crackpot. Later you were seen as a pioneer and a virtuoso of those techniques. Now some people might think that your methods were archaic. To see that kind of transition, you must get a great giggle out of it.

JU It’s so funny because you can go from being a revolutionary challenging the accepted to being archaic. But, you know it’s my vocabulary. One of the things I’ve felt, a bizzarre thing, was that really photography had become so camera oriented, and I had always liked the darkroom, it was this visual research lab, a place for alchemy to occur, when you look at photo magazines for every enlarger ad, there’s a hundred camera ads. So the focus, and for the populace too, because many people like to take pictures and they don’t have darkrooms, that always was the emphasis for the whole industry. Once I realized you could really alter these things in the darkroom and once I was in an environment ... My chief criticism when I was emerging was from photographers, but I didn’t get any of that from my art faculty friends here. They were fine with it. But the photographers constantly questioned me. One of the most common responses that used to throw me was, “This is interesting but it’s not photography.” Wait a minute. I buy everything at the camera store. What do you want to call it? Thirty years ago, particularly in academia, we wanted to define whatever media it was. This is what a photograph should look like and this is what a painting should look like. Then all of that changed.

JPC That’s where many of notions about photography came from. That method of approaching a definition. That whole impulse to analyze and separate ...

JU to show what the differences were.

JPC Exactly. And somehow legitimize it that way.

JU It’s true. It’s crazy. The New York Times used to have a page called Camera. “There’s a show of pictures of roses at the YMCA.” It wasn’t critical analysis. But the first photographers to be dealt with on the art page in the art section were people like Cartier-Bresson and Edward Weston, where the work was not threatening in any way to painting. Paul Strand, all the classic kind of safe stuff. Now today we have this whole ball of wax mixed together. There’s no separation.

JPC I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. And painting felt threatened the minute photography was born. But it’s very funny, later in the painting world it was photography that liberated painters from realism and sometimes figurative content. Now those confines don’t exist any more. I think we’ve been skirting this whole time that technique and the materials used have been driving this revolution or even the work that is made is really placing the emphasis on the wrong area. Perhaps, evolution is too optimistic a word, but it is a progression of vision. One would hope we could shift our concern to a history of vision, not a history of materials.

JU The limits are up here. It’s not in the materials. It’s endless, the possibilities that exist out there for making marks with whatever you have. You name the system. It is wide open. The limits are truly in how people think about it. We’ve seen major, major changes in the world of art. It is only natural to accept that thinking is constantly challenged. It goes up and down, some things survive and some things don’t, it’s part of life’s rich pageant. God I remember when photographs used to be 8x10 and now you’d be hard pressed to find them that size on display in a museum. When Ifirst started showing here, I was the only photographer on the art faculty and we had painters with these big canvases, and they’d put my pictures up and they’d look like the wall labels for the paintings. I’d watch people and they’d be looking at this painting from twenty feet and then they’d see this photograph and they’d take three steps forward. I thought, at least I’ll put up 11x14. I was poor back then. Eventually I got to 16x20. Big! That’s still big for me.

JPC We haven’t talked a lot about psychology. There is a tremendous psychological dimension to your work, in fact in your work it’s more overt than in much other photography out there. I wouldn’t say there isn’t a psychological dimension to the other work, we talked about Weston’s pepper last night, there is certainly a psychological dimension to that, but a surreal aesthetic does bring into focus those ideas of looking in and looking out, of the external world being used as a metaphor for the internal world. Have you studied psychology over the years?

JU Well ... I’m in total agreement with everything you just said. I have always been interested in psychology and one of my close friends was a major figure in humanistic psychology. There was a point at which I really believed in a lot of that. And then there was a point at which some people in Jungian psychology got interested in my work and started talking about the archetypal quality of some of the images. I had this article Bill Parker did back in the late sixties where he dug out all these old paintings that had similar things to what I had done and I was totally unaware of them and I do remember when he was interviewing me he’d ask me these elaborate questions. Were you thinking about this when you did this? What did you think about first when you did it? Most of the time I said, “I don’t know.””Oh great!” he’d respond. It’s like the fact that my conscious mind didn’t know was somehow the right answer. I’d never been in a situation where not knowing was what they wanted to hear. But I haven’t spent a great deal of time studying psychology but I like the dimension of this other sensibility where the images have a psychological presence. It’s not just a matter of responding to something visual, there’s a way in which humanistically you try to participate in whatever that event presents. I like the dream like sensibility. But I don’t like when people say, “Well you’re illustrating dreams.” I’m not. I don’t have a dream and then try and created it. But that sort of non-rational aspect of the dream that challenges your sense of reality. I like the fact that when we do fall asleep we become mythic and symbolic creatures. We invent these levels of reality.

JPC We find another realm of truth that can be liberated from rationality.

JU I’m always amazed the extent to which the images that I create people respond to them on that level. This is some kind of emotional thing that they can connect with. Particularly young people don’t have any problem with that stuff. I think it’s even hard for me to talk about that aspect of it, but it is important, the psychological dimension is really an important part of my work. I have been very, in recent years, one of the wonderful things that has happened is I get ten requests a year by somebody writing a poetry book wanting to use one of my photographs for the cover of their book. Or they’d find ways in which they connect. Some people have actually written poems about some of my photographs. So there is a way in which people who are dedicated to feeling and sensing things connect with the work. I really am grateful.

JPC Poetry would seem natural.

JU There’s sort of a leap of faith element there. In other words, where you have to in terms of responding you don’t challenge it. “What the fuck does this mean?” You go with it. There’s a way you can do that. The imagery has its own sensibility that a lot of people can connect with.

JPC You’re not looking for a logical justification but somehow it strikes another chord.

JU Right. Once you give up on trying to figure out what it means, it has another kind of meaning. It’s the whole thing that Louis Armstrong said when asked, “What does jazz mean?””If you have to ask you’re never going to get to know.” A lot of times people ask me to tell them what it means, like I’m going to give them some little secret. I think my art is very much a part of a tradition, yours is too, where it’s really directed towards the inventive consciousness not just the perceptive consciousness of seeing what’s there. It’s like they are called upon to participate in it if they are going to have any authentic experience with it. A lot of contemporary art functions in that way and it’s the extent to which it pulls it off that lets them really go with it. I don’t have any hidden agenda really. Some of the images I can connect to in specific ways, they have meaning for me, but whether other people get that same meaning is not a concern that I have. They should just respond to these things.

JPC And you don’t mind when they come up with responses that differ from yours?

JU No. Sometimes it’s really insightful to hear the way other people respond. Then I think that’s interesting. I’d never thought of that. And that leads to the Jungian thing.

JPC The Jungian notion would hope that we would all come up with a similar level. This other interactive element challenges that and suggests that the variety we get can be equally important. A specific individual content can be just as revealing to the participant as a cultural or universal one, and serves an important function. I’m very cautious about explaining my images to someone. I only do it if I feel they will be able to sustain their original impressions and can simply add mine to the ongoing dialog that occurs between the viewer and the subject. People will come up and ask me what is it. If I tell them it’s ice, they often quickly dismiss the image. But if I withold that information mystery persists and a richer experience is had by all.

JU I agree. I’ve had that same experience. I try, whenever I can, to at least give some more cryptic or poetic response. I don't like the idea that people think that art is somehow dumb. We do think about these things. You can provide clues. But I don’t want to present it like this is the answer, this what that one’s about, now lets move onto the next. Art history does a lot of naming. If you have to study art, that’s the thing that can screw you up, because you get to a point where you’re having to learn dates and names and styles and all this kind of stuff. And so you begin to think that’s the appropriate response to a painting.

JPC Reduce it to that and no more. That’s the science of the human endeavor. But very often we’re talking about a synthetic rather than an analytical viewpoint.

JU Actually, it reminds me, I used to have this thing, I’m always embarrassed it took me so long to figure out, when I’d go to New York we’d go to museums. Usually a group of faculty would drive up in the car. It took me a couple of years to realize once I got to the museum, to separate, because once we were together it was like this one-ups-manship game. Oh that’s so and so. That’s so and so. You studied art history, you’ve got to show what you know kind of thing. Even when I’m with Maggie now, a lot of times we’ll separate because if you just look at the work by yourself you don’t feel the need to have all this surface information come up. Well Maggie’s different. We just kind of look through and find things we respond to. For years the Museum of Modern Art had this little Rousseau room, it had three of his paintings. I’d go there and that was like a shrine. It was like saying hello, seeing an old friend again. Move on from there. I had a certain amount of energy and I tried to see things that I really responded to first before taking on the whole damn museum. But is interesting that that whole mental gymnastic part of me was so locked in that if I was with someone who also knew art well, “Let me show you what I know about art.” What do you know? You’re giving all this information and you’re not really responding.

JPC The difference between reciting what you have learned and expressing what you personally know. The process of living is about your own personal experience and the truth that brings. We are all witnesses to different experience.

JU Weston had this thing years ago, “When I was young you see, in my early thirties, I defined art as outer expression of inner growth. But I can’t define art any better today. My work has changed. It is not something to be learned apart, from books and rules. It is a living thing which depends on the whole participation. As we grow in life so we grow in art. Each of us in his own way.” Amen. Obviously that meant so much to me at one time that I memorized the damn thing. This is my, still modernist, romantic, poetic definition of art that still works, to a large extent, for me. I mean, I would modify it somewhat, but I still basically believe it.

JPC What haven’t I asked?

JU I don’t know. What haven’t you asked? Naturally curly!

JPC No implants?

JU I’ll give you some answers. You think of the questions.

JPC I’d like to do one more crazy thing. Let’s flip through the books and you tell me which ones you particularly like right now. And if you see a unifying element we can talk about that.

JU I can talk about all of these images.

JPC Just tell me about the ones you’re particularly interested in.

JU Fronticepiece of Photosynthesis. There’s a long story behind this. When I was lecturing at Boston University and I used to have a version of this that was the same boat. A slightly different shot that just transformed from the sky. I was lecturing one night and I showed a picture, a different image of water breaking in a box, and I said off the top of my head, “I wish Minor had been alive to see this. I think he would like it.” It was very Zenlike. I don’t know what that means but that’s what I said that night. And I then showed the slide of this boat in water and clouds. Afterwards a guy came up and he said, “You know I was at Minor’s bedside when he died. His last words were, ‘There’s a small boat waiting.’” And I kept coming back to that proof sheet and I have to confess it’s full of synchronistic moments. Then I did read on the death experience, it turns out the boat many people experience a tunnel of light, a figure made up of light, the boat is a recurring phenomenon that’s popular. Cross over the River Jordan, the whole journey. So I have a lot of images with boats.
Page 4. There are some images that I feel strongly about that have never become popular. This is an early one, the idea of landscape, I see this as dealing with parts of north Florida and it doesn’t replicate that landscape but it does embrace the way in which I experience that landscape.
Page ?. Sometimes the feminists get on my case, but I see this as like Mother Nature, the earth mother, the archetype. I hope I’ve never used the female in a perjorative way.
Page 13. This is kind of cryptic. I’m doing a series of museum studies. Maybe that will be my next book. I’ve always been interested and attracted to the kinds of things, the stuff, we put in museums.
Page ?. Oh boy. It’s tough out there. It’s hard in a way. When I did this book, these are images, I have a whole group that I think have a darker quality that I feel strongly about but I don’t know what’s in them, why I printed that kind of thing. I have a series of those. This would be one of them. Once you add the negative, or solarization, that instantly implies the psychological dimension.
Page ?. Been there, done that. I have a lecture. I could talk about a lot of these things. This is fairly recent. I remember I titled it my mid-life metaphor. You don’t want to talk about that.
Page ?. This is another one I don’t think this will ever be popular. As a matter of fact, it’s not bad that you have a range of imagery and some of it, by its very nature is more accessible than others. It’s just the way it is.

JPC Absolutely. Some of the images we do are very personal and we have to do them anyway.

JU Right. Right. It’s amazing sometimes people can connect with those that you think are personal and sometimes they can’t.
Page 47. This, I think is a fairly bizarre image, but in lecturing about it I used to show it and said it was important but I didn’t quite know what it was about. I had an English professor come up and say, “You know why that figure becomes intriguing, that illustratest the myth of Daphne and Apollo.” I thought, God, I had all that art history and the whole Jungian thing that that would occur. But that’s case where someone from the outside gave me a handle, a way of approaching it, because I’ve always looked at it and thought, “God, what was I thinking the day that I thought those things might go together?”
I have a lot of images that deal with genesis, birthing processes, beginnings. I don’t think it’s that you have to constantly come up with new ideas but as an imagemaker you can present a lot of ideas in a fresh visual way. Hell, if you constantly had to have some idea that was totally new!

JPC Some people say there are no new ideas. Shakespeare said there are only seven plots.

JU Well and that may be true but you try and deal with it is some fresh way - visually as an artist. These basic life themes are out there, they do recur in my work. I also don’t think, God, it’s certainly not the artist’s task to resolve life’s mysteries. If anything it’s to generate more. I like that aspect.

JPC Or to heighten them in a profound way.

JU Yeah. To give some heightened awareness to something that can be experienced differently. This is a sort of after the fact thing too. I had this in a faculty show, I was about to go into the gallery and one of the artist historians was leaving. He said, “I loved your Boticelli but what is it talking about?” I certainly was not consciously thinking about that the time.
Page 57. This is another genesis kind of thing. People don’t always notice the figure between the split rocks and recurring down there. A lot of these I can connect in many ways. A guy, a very dear friend of mine, who died a few years ago, an Episcopal minister, a really poetic wonderful man, he gave me this rock. It looked like a heart. One day he said, “I thought you would like this rock.” Someone gives you a rock! Part of you thinks, “This is stupid. Oh yeah, thank you for the rock.” Eventually I photographed it and held it and it takes on another karma and then eventually it becomes an image. This one has become popular.

JPC All of my friends have gotten wise to the fact that I love it when they give me a stone or a shell or a bone or a bug.

JU I’m giving you parts of my lecture again. But I did have a thing seven or eight years ago, Portfolio one of those places out of New York, made a postcard out of this image and some guy in New York City, an architectural historian, was doing an article on bizarre building. He tracked me down through this and he wanted to know where the building was. He thought it was a real thing, that’s the veracity the photograph can have.

JPC 2%

JU There was a show that wanted preferential imagery and popular imagery, one of each. The popular imagery was your most popular image, and my most popular image was this guy here (cover of Process and Perception) but the image I liked a lot that has never become popular was this one (page 97), I liked it because it was obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious. And it still has a sense of mystery.

JPC You’re in a few of these. Self-portraiture. To one degree or another, every artist makes self-portaiture.

JU I agree. I am actually in a few. The only reason I do that is when I start teaching photography I get students to do self-portraiture and I figured I’d better do it too. And I began to realize that often the camera is a very threatening thing to have pointed at you.

JPC It’s funny how many photographers squirm when a camera is turned on them.

JU I haven’t worked it out. But I do self-portraits every year, at least one or two. It’s somewhere between performance piece, it’s like a thing that you’re doing, private theater. I set the camera up and usually I take the shot myself, a timer or something. The cosmetic consciousness enters in, all this kind of bullshit that goes on. Sometimes I’m able to make a meaningful image with it and sometimes they’re just silly images.