For me, there are three sides to ’80s photography: Metro Pictures, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the Germans. In other words, there was appropriation, AIDS and the memory-function of photography, and the Bechers. In school, I took the whole “there are no more pictures to be taken” idea very much to heart. But then I saw the typological possibilities of the Germans, and the way they crafted images, and that brought everything back to taking pictures.
—As told to Tim Griffin
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