This work both orders the world and exaggerates its chaos. With the camera on a tripod, I take many photos, leave in the best ones and omit the rest. The photographs are composed but they have not been changed, only selected. My work is about the strangeness of time, about how people really look, and about the surprising world that is only visible with a camera. I want to capture more life, more people, more time, and more truth in my photographs. Photography, with its ability to record everything in front of the lens, is just the beginning of this process. Selected People is inspired by surveillance photography, Walker Evans’s hidden-camera subway portraits, and P.L. di Corcia’s Head series; works in which the camera waits for its subjects to come into view. My work also looks at city life from a fixed position, with the difference that each image contains an hour’s time and is a composition of hundreds of exposures. To do this, I put the camera on a tripod, and take hundreds of pictures as people pass by. Back in the studio, I choose what to leave in and make no further alterations. The process mirrors the way the mind focuses attention on one thing but not on another. A person thinking about photography, for example, tends to notice people with cameras over those without. This kind of selection allows me to take objective facts–the faces and bodies of people on the street–and make something new and more subjective out of them, simply by sorting them. Above all, I want to show a surprising world that is visible only with a camera.

This work both orders the world and exaggerates its chaos. With the camera on a tripod, I take many photos, leave in the best ones and omit the rest. The photographs are composed but they have not been changed, only selected. My work is about the strangeness of time, about how people really look, and about the surprising world that is only visible with a camera. I want to capture more life, more people, more time, and more truth in my photographs. Photography, with its ability to record everything in front of the lens, is just the beginning of this process. Selected People is inspired by surveillance photography, Walker Evans’s hidden-camera subway portraits, and P.L. di Corcia’s Head series; works in which the camera waits for its subjects to come into view. My work also looks at city life from a fixed position, with the difference that each image contains an hour’s time and is a composition of hundreds of exposures. To do this, I put the camera on a tripod, and take hundreds of pictures as people pass by. Back in the studio, I choose what to leave in and make no further alterations. The process mirrors the way the mind focuses attention on one thing but not on another. A person thinking about photography, for example, tends to notice people with cameras over those without. This kind of selection allows me to take objective facts–the faces and bodies of people on the street–and make something new and more subjective out of them, simply by sorting them. Above all, I want to show a surprising world that is visible only with a camera.