Also some not-so-great photographers everywhere.

Well, and then there’s plenty of those, too, but the good ones will bubble up to the top in most cases. I’ve been trying, using these old cameras, to do something that to me brings a little different view of what it is I’m looking at. It’s not as if you even know what you’re going to get ahead of time. I absolutely never know if I have anything good with this Graflex camera. Too many things could go wrong, and you have all the things you have to do to set it up.

There is this wonderful book of pictures by Laura Wilson—she’s the mother of the three Wilson brothers, the actors [Owen, Luke, and Andrew]—who was one of the assistants to Richard Avedon when he did his work in the South and particularly in Texas, of taking his eight-by-ten camera and just meandering around and photographing people he saw. He arrives at a ranch or something, and then he puts up his white paper and then puts them against it, and the light is there and he’s got all these assistants pulling the dark slide and doing everything. But then he’s the one who squeezes the bulb or the cable release to make the picture. When you’re doing it like I’m doing it or the few people that are shooting film now, we’re all pretty much doing it on our own, and we’re doing everything. You’re having to figure out where you’re going to be shooting and what room it’s going to be in, and what place once you get to that room, and there’s nothing easy about it. Then on top of that, you have these other seven or eight steps that you have to do in just the right order to make a picture.

For me, what’s the motivation? I think I just love the idea of trying to shoot something that might make you feel that it was 1952 or 1947, just because there’s so much atmosphere. Not always, but sometimes the atmosphere you can cut with a knife. I’m trying to grab a little bit of that, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I would say, in fact, like most of photography, most of the time it doesn’t work.