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Transcription: [00:06:13]
So that's one of the earliest, and that was done entirely when I was in my own world of just making my own pictures.

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There was no audience. There was never an expectation that it was gonna be at the national portrait gallery or any of that.

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Things really changed after this body of work, cause it made it out into the world,

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and all of a sudden I had all sorts of new opportunities.

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And I, you know, I worked at an art museum for seven years as part of the in-house photography staff.

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And I had to leave that job and figure out what I was gonna do.

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And, you know, there was the option of teaching.

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And- But somehow, you know, I wanted to keep travelling, keep moving

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And so doing- being a working photographer seemed like a good, you know, option.

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I could use this attention from the art world to try and do that.

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So I started taking, kinda, every assignment that came along, in the beginning.

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And one of the assignments was for Entertainment Weekly.

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Okay, and it was, you know I was, the author of the newest version of The Godfather. Okay?

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So this is not a real high level assignment.

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So I went to Tallahassee to take his picture.

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And the picture's terrible, I mean it's really, really bad.

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But when I was in Tallahassee, my assistant and I went to this diner

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And this picture was made. And a big change happened photographically for me, sort of between this time and this time,

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which is that, I reall-, you don't see it here but a lot of the pictures in Sleeping by the Mississippi were quite complicated,

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lots of things happening in them.

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And I really got tired of that, and I started simplifying pictures around this time

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So, you know, I had a-, We had time to kill. I had a couple hours til my shoot, I'm having lunch.

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She walks in with her father,

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and he's wearing fatigues. She's got this red hair.

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And they're eating here and they have just piles of like, you know, fried chickens, you know, and Southern cooking.

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And- So I set up my camera. I use often a large format camera, sort of a dark cloth over the head

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So it becomes quite a scene in a restaurant.

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Everyone's very aware of me.

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And then eventually I realize the father is kind of a distraction. Take him out.

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I thought the food was good, but then I realized it wasn't. I take the food out.

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And what's happening here is that, you know, ten minutes have passed,

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and she's as bored as could be, you know.

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But she has to stay still, because the other thing about this camera is that it's a very limited focus area,

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so you'll notice that, you know, her eye is in focus, her shoulder is not.

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Even her mouth is out of focus, so it's just a-

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there's a little plane of focus that's between her eye and this tablecloth,

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and so she has to stay there

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And- So she's, you know, probably falling asleep.

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But hopefully that's not how you read the picture.

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You read it as this sort of dreamy picture.