And that's where art comes from.
[MUSIC]
>> When did you first start taking pictures of people?
>> 1976, I was finishing Boston Views,
the pictures people call topographic, and I got tired of it.
And day by day, just people started to creep in.
[MUSIC]
The minute you get to a certain distance, a certain closeness of the person,
then it's all about the person,
and the background becomes something that has to be integrated with the frame.
But it's not about the overall view anymore.
Jan Gruber said a good thing once when she went from painting to photography.
She said, it took me a while to figure it out,
but in photography the problem is making the grass as interesting as the cow.
[MUSIC]
The Brown Sisters is a series of 41 photographs of my wife Bebe and
her three sisters.
I've taken it every year for 41 years.
I use the same camera every year, 8 by 10 and they stand in the same order.
The only thing I really every say is get closer please if the space between
them is boring.
If further like here you have to stay and through the back and so
their faces are smaller therefore less voluptuous and less powerful physically.
So the closer they are together, the more the physicality of their faces and
gestures, the larger it is in the frame.
[MUSIC]
Okay.
The cheek one again please.
[MUSIC]
Now that I'm trying to make digital work,
I started a series of two people putting their faces close together, touching, and
letting whatever feelings of discomfort or comfort or amusement, fear, show.
Okay, close close.
I think it's letting me be a little more intimate and
physical with people than I've been able to be before.
I want to get rid of the idea that they have their private space.
They don't have any in these pictures.
They're all in the same place, like a subway.
They're all in a place where they're forced by the truke of the project to
do something unnatural in order for something intense to come out.
The slice of time that it takes to take the picture is smaller, so
now it might be a hundredth of a second instead of an eighth of a second.
With an eighth of a second a person has to be aware of it
in a way that they don't the other way.
I tend to like them to be aware of it even with a digital camera anyway, so
I tend to do it the same way.
Sarah MeisterCurator
