Play Audio Story In My Stairwell
One of the great challenges of this project was tailoring each photo in order to accommodate the great range of individuals I worked with. Sometimes the shoots were conceptual and other times they had more to do with how the subjects viewed themselves rather than how I viewed them, and that was equally as interesting. In certain cases, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to say, and other times, it was much more intuitive or improvisational.
Transcript
My third book, In My Stairwell was a collection of images in a unique space in my new studio on Charles Street. Originally a carriage house, the actual elevator, which was a carriage elevator and a horse elevator, was too big for us to actually be able to maneuver. So we ended up taking it out and putting in a smaller elevator, and at the very top of where the cab lived, we found this beautiful North light skylight, which created the perfect natural light situation. I started to photograph people up there that, you would occasionally pop into the studio for an assignment. So, it was an ancillary experience of taking a subject up to the stairwell. Then I got this idea that I would invite artists outside of the mainstream to come visit at the stairwell and just see what that collection would look like. I married platinum palladium printing with the process, and eventually, the collection became a book. And with the help of BAM, we were able to cast some very unique artists that were not so mainstream. People like Paloma Herrera and Susan Stroman, David Russell, the late Hal Willner, or Baryshnikov, Bill Irwin, and Richard Serra. There were so many interesting people that walked into that stairwell, and the brick was so dense and so old, and patina, that I stumbled upon platinum-palladium printmaking. And that became the little sister to the project. So, the printing was really the 50% of the project. Printmaking has always been a very important aspect to the way that I think about a project. You start with a destination, but the actual technique of what the print will look like, the finished product, is the other 50% of it all, and that was very unique to how the stairwell project came together.