As an artist working with photographs, what excites you particularly about the vernacular?

By far, it is the anonymity and ambiguity of these images that inspire me most. I have very little interest in the specificity of these images and prefer to divorce them from the contexts in which they were made while bending the relationships between past, present, and future interpretations.

Since 2009, you have edited several fascinating artist’s books from the Peter J. Cohen Collection. Working in archives, processing archival documents is an exciting segment of contemporary art. How did you first encounter the Collection? What attracted you to it?

I met Peter in a restaurant in the East Village in New York where I worked as a server and where he was a regular guest. Through casual conversation, we discovered we had a lot in common. He invited me to visit his collection, and we became fast friends through our mutual excitement for looking at pictures. Soon after, I started regularly visiting to help organize his new pictures into categories and during those visits I would often drift off into these daydreaming sessions. What I love most about Peter’s collection is the physicality of it and the generous range of subject matter. Because of this broad range of visual information, it was a perfect venue to explore the shapeshifting and time/space travel possibilities of images.

In an earlier interview you mentioned that once a particular photo catches your eye, Mr. Cohen collects more thematically similar pictures for you. I find this kind of collector-artist collaboration an interesting dynamic. How much Mr. Cohen is involved in the process? Do you actively consult during editing?

Peter collaborates with many artists and curators. He will sometimes pitch a specific category that he is particularly excited about to curators and artists in the hopes of generating interest, whether it is an institutional donation that will be exhibited or a book project. I have worked on a few books that were more categorically structured, and he would actively seek images to add to the collection that fit the category. But I generally like to work in solitude and Peter has always given me a wide berth. Sometimes I will reach out and ask if he has something that I am looking for and a couple weeks later an envelope will arrive in the mail. But conceptually, he has always been pretty hands off with me.

As you stated in an interview, your artist’s book inspired by Shirley Jackson’s short story titled The Lottery, you talked about picking the photos you work with intuitively. In the case of the Collection however, we are talking about an extensive archive containing more than 60,000 photographs that are organized into 130 categories. Where do you begin a creative journey such as the making of The Lottery?

The journey starts by building a visual vocabulary that is prompted by a specific image, a set of motifs, and the psychology of the contemporary moment. I began The Lottery in 2015 while living in Texas and during the lead up to the US presidential election. The nucleus for this body of work was a press image of a crowd, inspired by the phenomena of mob mentality. I was actively making pictures and collecting anonymous images, in addition to pulling from Peter’s collection, which of late has been limited to a small pool of scans and a box of orphaned images that I have in the studio. But when I visited the collection more regularly, I tried to empty my mind and allow the images to do most of the work. It is hard to explain, but I will signal back to the idea of anonymity and ambiguity, as well as quickness. I would look through a stack or box of images very quickly and set aside images that loosely evoke a feeling that I may want to tap into later. There is not a lot of thinking at this stage. I would take the images home with me and sit with them for a while, allowing the images and my ideas to simmer. This is a much slower process.

In the abstract of The Lottery, you mention a loose connection to an earlier work of yours titled Dive Dark Dream Slow. Looking at the two artist’s books side by side, I find it interesting how in the latter you seemingly play more freely with the sizes and the placements of the photographs – I’m wondering what this difference implies. 

Both books evoke different atmospheres. In Dive Dark Dream Slow, the pacing builds musically and the variety in scale supports this pacing, with negative space, full bleeds, etc. The Lottery, on the other hand, I wanted to feel relentless, as if there was no rest from the madness. I think the consistent template leading up to the final coda achieves this through open compositions and no negative spaces or breaks. 

In certain publications, like The Lottery or your latest book titled Fever Field, you have combined anonymous photos with your own pictures. What was the inspiration behind mixing the different perspectives? How do they relate to each other?

I have an active image-making practice and a large personal archive. I collect and use these images in the same way that I would find anonymous images – as raw material for the future. These days, I have become especially interested in putting images from the distant past in dialogue with the contemporary, as a call-and-response process. I am particularly interested in combining images from the interwar period with images made today. I am curious about the connections of these two discreet moments, the psychology of the modern world and the chemistry created through traveling in and out of these periods.

What influences your decision to invite a designer to work with or to execute the book by yourself? How does the process look like in both cases?

Making a book always involves some level of collaboration. I try to complete a layout and design myself before sharing the work with another set of eyes. I always start with my partner Ed Panar, who is a photographer and self-trained graphic designer. He helps me to tighten up the graphics and gives me feedback on the concept and sequence. I have published several books with The Ice Plant in Los Angeles and they’re great about making subtle tweaks to my initial design, but it’s always a collaborative process. After making several maquettes for The Lottery, I decided to bring in a designer for the first time in my practice. I was having a tough time breaking old habits and none of my iterations felt like they were achieving what the work needed. It was important to me that the designer was female, and I loved the work of Giulia Boccarossa. She was able to distill the work in a way that I was unable to and created a simple template for the layout that really elevated the image sequence.

Some of your artist’s books are reinterpreted as installations. For instance, at a 2015 exhibition the photos from your book titled Dive Dark Dream Slow were installed in a rather interesting way. As if the framed pictures were forming two parallel lines – narratives, if we may say –, however, their layout resembled a mind map. How do you translate your idea from a book’s pages to a gallery’s wall?

I treat each opportunity to exhibit my work on the walls uniquely. I usually create a physical model of space as part of the design process. It is always different, depending on the space, the curator, the budget, and whether the exhibition opportunity precedes the book or vice versa. For Dive Dark Dream Slow, the book was published before the exhibition, and we wanted to translate the entire sequence of the book to the wall. We wanted to use the original artifacts and not reproductions. The strategy was simple: each book spread is hung together in the book’s chronology, zigzagging the connections of each spread, and forming two long rows stacked on top of one another. The opportunity to exhibit The Lottery came out of my residency at Light Work at Syracuse University in New York before the book was published. I had the support of the lab at Light Work for file preparation, print production, and framing which allowed for a lot more freedom to experiment on the walls. I wanted to play with scales and rhythm.