Lee Friedlander (1934-) almost certainly doesn’t know this, but he and his work that I discovered very early in my photography career gave me permission to break many of the rules that some were prescribing, making me understand more of what was possible with my medium. When I learned that he would be in Carmel, California in 1972, I assembled a group of friends to accompany me there to meet and hear him. Friedlander devoted much of his time then to introducing us to his discovery of the largely unknown photographs of prostitutes by New Orleans photographer E.J. Bellocq. But he also tried to excite us with the possibility of “capturing the intelligence that already exists in the universe”.
To this day, I capture images in mirrors of all kinds, frame images with foreground vertical elements interrupting and bisecting the view, try to find personal ways of eluding the cliché of photographing my own shadow, and more.