1975 | La Mesa, California
I might have made this in 1974; the decorations on the house across the street are ambiguous. I was busy then as a new father, and I began labeling my negatives at the time they were processed, not necessarily when they were taken.
But pictures like this prompted me to avoid using the word “composition” in my classes. For me, photographs are not composed, as a drawing might be, stroke by stroke, but organized, from all the material in front of the photographer, managed by the Big Three — Vantage Point, Frame, Moment.
If this picture’s structure looks familiar, it may well be; at this time there was a strong wind blowing west from New York, carrying the heady scent of Lee Friedlander. A lot of us were trying to figure out what he was doing, and how he went about it, gaining inspiration as we looked for our own open position in the guild. Ben Lifson intensively studied the masters of our medium, and he said that every time he saw a scene that reminded him of Timothy O’Sullivan, he pressed the button.