Where did the work in Transgressions come from? Why is it so different from my other books? Am I a straight photographer or a manipulator of photographs?

Answering the last question is like having to explain why you are bisexual or why you like classical as well as pop music. Life is not always an either / or choice, and I use photographs that I minimally process as well as photographs that I obviously alter, and I am fine with both. Sorry if this violates anyone’s rules for purity and seriousness.

It may seem like I am making a fuss over nothing, but over the years I have learned to be careful to whom I showed the images from Transgressions. Several authority figures who saw them advised me that I was on the wrong path and that I should stick to straight photography. This makes sense if you consider that insiders invested in following the rules might not take kindly to outsiders who break the rules. Notably, then SF MOMA curator Van Deren Coke responded encouragingly to my images but planned follow up with him never materialized.

The images in Transgressions are representative of a larger body of work that has existed as a book dummy since the 1980s and that has undergone several rounds of editing since then. I had the intention to publish it in the early 2000s but life events decided otherwise.

To answer the first question about the work’s origins, I began cutting up photographs partly after seeing examples of collaged photos in the MOMA Mirrors and Windows show catalogue in the later 70s. After playing with manipulation / intervention for a few years I left it until the later 80s. Since then I have continued to do collages, but I would argue that actually I have never abandoned straight photography. Even if the shape of the photographs, for example in my recent collaged text series, is not a square or a rectangle, the photographs themselves are used to represent what they depict. I could have used the same photographs in a traditional format and simply added the text as a title, but it would not have been the same.

In Transgressions as well most of the photographs to my mind are straight photographs, it is just that parts of them are missing or superimposed over another version of the same scene or perhaps a different image. There are a few outliers, but in general things in the photographs are seen as what they are.