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and one day in my last year of graduate school, with a documentary project going badly, my professor paul d'amato suggested a different tack. "why don't you do a master's study?" he suggested. i looked at him sideways. "isn't that what i'm doing now?" "no, no: a master's study, in the painting sense. pick a master, someone that you consider as such--someone you've always loved and not known why. find out all you can about how they worked, their technique and materials, and try to make some images in their spirit. at first it may look like imitation, but then you might discover something about your own vision that you would never have arrived at." he said that, and i realized what he was giving me: the chance to make images i would never make otherwise, freed from the impending sense that i had to finish the uninspiring project i was undertaking. this was an opportunity to stretch, and see if i could see a fraction of the way that this little old japanese man did, bowling me over as he did so. i knew immediately who my "master" was. masao yamamoto
i came back a week later sticking these tiny little tea-stained pictures to the wall. in repeating series, each a little varied in exposure, staining or size. photographs without any people in them. photographs of a city of 8.5 million people that looks like everyone just left the party. a hose wrapped around an iron fence. plastic hanging from a lamp post, flying in the wind. birds in a bare tree, looking like ornaments that had been carefully placed there. paul didn't believe i took them, at first. "you?" he kept saying incredulously. "the same person who was photographing civil war re-enactments, you took these?" and then he straightened up. "these were always there in you, waiting to be made. this should be the work you do the rest of the time you are here." and he was right and it was and i have never enjoyed photographs that i have made more, or the making of them.
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