What is a photogram?

It's light recorded onto the paper — which is also the definition of a photograph — but there's no camera. It’s the oldest photographic process. You could put an object on top of a piece of cardboard, take that object off 30 minutes later, and you'll see a mark on the cardboard because the sun bleaches it. But I build these complex layering systems, almost like a printmaker, and expose each part separately.

Have you worked as a printmaker before?

I’ve done printmaking, but I consider myself an experimental photographer. I think of myself almost like a pseudoscientist or something — I’m constantly trying to push the boundaries of what photography can do. In general, I feel like I'm doing one of the most pure forms of photography. Others would disagree with that, because some people are like, “Is this even photography?” But even though it's like light painting, I still arrived there through photography. I'm just bypassing the camera.

      And now I’ve got collage elements going on, and drawing and painting and sculpture getting into it — and who knows what will happen next, because now I'm making those works at Wassaic where basically the whole piece is about that bleeding light on the wall. There's no art at all, it's just light. It’s so exciting to see that, because you see it all the time in your life. Like, you suddenly see light coming in on the floor and think, That’s so precious, that little moment.

I mean, I can't count the amount of times I've been, like, sitting on the subway in New York thinking, Am I gonna cry at the way that the light is hitting the inside of this gross-ass subway car? What is happening to me?

Which is to say: it makes me glad to know that someone out there has found a way to capture that kind of thing.

[Laughs.] Yeah. Even if you have that moment and you take a picture of it and try to show someone later, it’s not the same. Light like that emanates some sort of special interior energy. It's an external phenomenon, but because those are usually calm, quiet moments, they’re connected to the inner world.

What does your process look like in the darkroom?

I do a lot of drawing out of my images, and researching how I'm going to put something together before I get going on it. I have to have a strong image of how they're going to look before I get going. It can't really be intuitive, or it will fail — just because the paper can only take so much light, and not too much, really. That's why I said it's a little bit like printmaking, because there's an order, and if you don't do it in the right order, then you can’t expose part of it, or you have to expose part of it twice, or a layer won’t line up.

      So I sit in the dark with a low light on and think about every step I'm going to take before I do it, and figure out what obstacles might arise. I have certain rules of where everything goes — especially with my knife, because I have to cut a lot of things in the dark. Sometimes I'll set little markers of tape out on the table so I can feel along, and I know once I touch the tape that I need to move forward with my hand and do something. Or I walk around my surface table to make sure there's nothing for me to trip on.

      And then I turn off the lights and I make the piece. It's more of an execution. Usually it's pretty zen. Once I'm in it, it's like 15 minutes. I just take the steps that have to be taken.

How has that process changed your relationship to the darkroom and your negatives? I guess sort of what I'm getting at is, like, when you take a photograph with a camera you know roughly how it's gonna end up, but when you're building the negative, you don't have that original reference to a scene you’re looking at.

I mean, when you come from film, a lot of times what you thought you were gonna get wasn't what you ended up getting until you start to really know what the camera is doing. But I like that the photograms I make reference only themselves — they don't reference something else in the outside world. Like, a landscape piece might be a combination of a few different places put together, but it's really no place.

Say more?

What the work gives to somebody else and what they receive from it could be an infinite amount of things that I don't know. Once I create it, I just let it go. I may pre-plan what I'm going to do exactly, but once the work is there, I take a read from it: Now what do I see? I let it talk back to me and tell me what its title is, because then I see that piece as something that’s outside of me, so I'm relating to it not as mine, in a way. I like the viewer to know what it's called, but I still can't even control how they see it. Photography is like that, too: what one person sees is so different than what another sees in that exact same space, and that's so interesting.