You have quite a few books in your studio — what have you been reading while here?

Let's see. I got here in a little bit of a reading hype and threw so, so many books in my car. But it's really nice to have all these shelves to let them sit up there. I've tried to make tiny little poems or stories about what books are next to each other. That nook right there has Vija Celmins’ book To Fix the Image in Memory. Over her whole 30-year career, 20 years of it have been drawing the same several pictures of the ocean and stars, with no horizon. Really minimal. And then the book next to that is Unburdened by Meaning by Adam Tullie and Devendra Banhart. So that square is, for me, about not trying to impose a lot of meaning, but just admiring something and following what you really love to do.

It's a creative cataloging system; it’s not library sciences, but it’s aesthetically pleasing and intellectually stimulating for me.

What is the role of narrative in your work as a photographer, then?

I think that a photograph on its own is a bit more like a poem: it's a tiny, matter-of-fact glimpse of something. But as soon as you start to put multiple pictures together, it becomes something more like a storyboard for a film — whether that’s a chronological feature film, or other forms of film that play with our traditional understanding of narrative forms.

So in my phoetry — I just said “phoetry.”

[Laughs] I love that as a hybrid word. What a wonderful Freudian slip there.

In my photography, I find so pleasing the way that I can impose meaning on one image just by placing it next to another image.

Here's maybe a better way to explain that: the beauty I find in narrative is that if you take a novel and open it up to a random page, you might find tidbits of prose that are really appealing to you, but you're not going to be hit with this, “Oh, my gosh, I have to cry.” You have to read from the beginning, and do all of this contextualizing until the words start to become heavier and heavier.

I just recently had this show where I installed one piece made of 26 photographs. One part is a sequence of five images of a sculpture, and with every new frame there are more elements added onto the sculpture — so that you see the sculpture build if you walk from left to right. That's our normal Western way of understanding imagery, or reading a text, or discovering a narrative. But there's also another set of images that unfold from the right to the left, and then there are several images in there that don't have any relation to a temporal shift. Almost like a composer would compose with different instruments, I’ve got these different kinds of photos that I’ve placed together — but the interesting part is that the viewer becomes the active narrative agent.

But what I'm doing here [in Wassaic] is creating one picture. It’s a studio composition of multiple pictures, layered in the way that one would slowly accrue layers in a painting or a print. I'm using this very traditional camera that only uses the fundamentals of photography. There's a lens, there's a plane where the film is, and everything else is completely up to me knowing how the science of photography works.

To craft one picture really well is a beautiful opposition to what technology has provided for everyone: the ability to take pictures easily. I’m from the Silicon Valley, and have really conflicted feelings about technology, and notions of progress. Photography is complicated in that conversation, of course, because even at the very beginning it was used as a way for anyone to reproduce nature without having to be a master painter. But I feel like I left that long ago and have just been wandering further and further back into the past.

You talked about how the experience of viewing one image is different from viewing several images in sequence, but how do you think about the narrative of one composite image made of many images? That feels like an interestingly different case.

While I enjoy bending the genre of photography and how we receive it, part of me still wants to grapple with the true nature of photography, which is one frame. Excluding everything else, if a stranger can't walk up to the picture and see it, then I as the artist am just projecting and assuming that people are going to see things that aren’t there.

So the viewer is no longer quite so active in their completion of the work, but I’m still dealing with the materiality of imagery. I'm shooting on the biggest film I can get my hands on is because I don't want to see any grain. I want it to be as photorealistic as possible; I want there to be an actual illusion, where when the viewer walks up to it they think that they're going to be able to touch it, and instead it's just a flat picture. It's a facsimile of life.