Throughout the ’80s contemporary photography was polarized between two factions. Documentary photographers searched to find beauty, transcendence, and truth in photographic form, while the first generation of postmodernists completely debunked that tradition, showing all photographs to be constructs and fictions. It really seemed like an ideological split at the time; you had to be in one camp or the other. My response was kind of schizophrenic: I made a personal attempt to reconcile the two positions, merging the aesthetics of photographic truth and photographic lie. Today, the contested question of photography’s truthfulness has lost its urgency. Photographers use conventions from both traditions to construct their own subjective approaches to the medium.
—As told to Tim Griffin
