"I began working with groups of photographs right from the beginning. It probably came out of a frustration with what seemed to me the superficial completeness of a single photographic glance. [...] It was more interesting to me that groups of photographs could act as aggregates, that individual photographs could stand in relationship to each other as stanzas in a poem, or collections of poems in a book. That there could be interdependencies that would bolster, reinforce, undermine, contradict each other within the body of a work. [...] I organized the photographs not so much chronologically, or to trace a narrative, or by typologies, say the way the Bechers have, but by following an associative logic based on affinities and disjunctions among pictures and picture groups."
"I try to make my pictures read as plausible stares. It’s one of the things I admired about Robert Frank’s pictures when I first saw them, how much they felt like what it was like to see. In his case and in a lot of Andre Kertesz’s work, it’s not so much a stare as a glance. But the principle holds. One of the things I built into my pieces — most self-consciously starting with Snohomish — was that my proximity to a subject would reflect my curiosity and, to use a loaded word, intention. So when I was photographing things very close up, I often used a wide-angle lens. The pictures don’t look wide angle, but they approximate what it feels like to stand very close to something and stare at it. If I were to use that lens to photograph things from further away, you’d be much more conscious of the photographic distortion. I was interested in disguising the distortion and instead making a sequence of pictures that, one by one, read as moments of consciously focused attention. This introduces the idea of the looker and so raises the question: why is somebody staring at something this closely; wherein lies his curiosity that he would look at something in such a way? To the extent that it evokes the act of looking, it suggests a frame of mind in which somebody’s attention is aroused. Then you have introduced to the photographic project something like literary voice."
Interview of Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling in BOMB Magazine, Spring 2008, Issue 103 here.
"I try to make my pictures read as plausible stares. It’s one of the things I admired about Robert Frank’s pictures when I first saw them, how much they felt like what it was like to see. In his case and in a lot of Andre Kertesz’s work, it’s not so much a stare as a glance. But the principle holds. One of the things I built into my pieces — most self-consciously starting with Snohomish — was that my proximity to a subject would reflect my curiosity and, to use a loaded word, intention. So when I was photographing things very close up, I often used a wide-angle lens. The pictures don’t look wide angle, but they approximate what it feels like to stand very close to something and stare at it. If I were to use that lens to photograph things from further away, you’d be much more conscious of the photographic distortion. I was interested in disguising the distortion and instead making a sequence of pictures that, one by one, read as moments of consciously focused attention. This introduces the idea of the looker and so raises the question: why is somebody staring at something this closely; wherein lies his curiosity that he would look at something in such a way? To the extent that it evokes the act of looking, it suggests a frame of mind in which somebody’s attention is aroused. Then you have introduced to the photographic project something like literary voice."
Interview of Joseph Bartscherer by James Welling in BOMB Magazine, Spring 2008, Issue 103 here.
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