Can you talk a little about how “Deep South” came to be?
It turned out to be an accretion of different projects. Like all my projects, I didn’t think about what the end product would be – I just started taking pictures. It started with pictures of the farm – I’ve been taking pictures on this farm since 1972, but gradually I began to cast my net a little further out in the state, and then further South.
You’re also using new techniques?
The pictures of Georgia were taken with ortho [SP] film. One out of every 10 turns out at all; they’re so wildly overexposed – they develop really fast and much of the time the flaws you see in the book are the results of that rapid development. The Virginia pictures were made with regular film, black and white. The “Deep South” section is a mix of regular film and wet plate collodion photography.
