Wanting Attention

In college, everyone was talking about information overload.

There was this essay called “The Precession of Simulacra” that said we couldn’t see anything anymore; that when we looked at something we were preceded by images we’d seen in the media. I wasn’t so sure. So I thought I’d see if it was true. 

I walked around Kingston, NY with a 4x5 view camera, a bag of equipment, and second bag of objects. I looked like a hobo, but wandered all over photographing people looking at the objects, hoping to capture some aspect of actual human attention. I called it “Wanting Attention,” since wanting means both desiring and lacking. At the time, I played on an all-photographer softball team called 1839 (the sacred year both photography and baseball were invented) and had “Sally Mann” stenciled on the back of my jersey. You can see her influence in these pictures.