I see myself as a case to study. A target market receptive to certain shades and phrasings. A very small focus group. Over the course of five years, I visited self-definedly political locations (statehouses, clubhouses, campaign offices, rallies) and scrounged for visual meanings, no matter how oblique, that pierced through the film of ostensible political purpose to some deeper emulsion. I allowed myself no special access, visiting sites I could talk my way into with a view camera and valid driver’s license. I spent time looking at Lee Friedlander’s American Monument, which addresses an architectural form designed to be seen—to be photographed—and manages to leach the rationality from this transaction. The pictures made me think of the strange logic in photography where an image can be at once totally transparent and totally inscrutable. What is it? is easy to ask. What does it mean? often isn’t. The work is flush with signs‑sandwich boards not semiotics. Any space can be made into a political one by tacking up a placard saying so. There is an inevitable pathos in it, like the stars and stripes in black and white on the blasted ill-lit moon, or Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, carving out a lawful place in the American West by tacking up a painted sign saying “Attorney at Law.” There is the genetic grace of human transformation. I’ve photographed in fast food restaurants, malls, warehouses, barber shops, neighbors’ rec rooms and halls of justice, searching for a position where the photograph can both celebrate and criticize. I try to treat the world of ideologies the way a blind man might search the dimensions of a new room: feeling for all possibilities and inevitably favoring the richest avenues of egress. Inevitably, I have turned up a wide range of impressions, from the comic to the desperate, and try not to flinch from the faith in photography to convey the complex experiences scratching up the surfaces of the world. MY LIFE IN POLITICS was commissioned by The Bohen Foundation as an exhibition in 2004, and was published by Aperture in 2006 as a beautiful monograph, designed by Andrew Sloat with an essay by Jack Hitt.

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