I Want Pictorial Content Without

Composition Is A Side Issue. Its Role In My Selection Of Photographs Is A Negative One At Best. By Which I Mean That The Fascination Of A Photograph Is Not In Its Eccentric Composition But In What It Has To Say: Its Information Content. And, On The Other Hand, Composition Always Also Has Its Own Fortuitous Rightness.

I Pursue No Objectives, No Systems, No Tendency; I Have No Program, No Style, No Direction. I Have No Time For Specialized Concerns, Working Themes, Or Variations That Lead To Mastery. I Steer Clear Of Definitions. I Don’t Know What I Want. I Am Inconsistent, Non-committal, Passive; I Like The Indefinite, The Boundless; I Like Continual Uncertainty.

That Was A Piece I Did In 1963 With Konrad Lueg In A Department Store, In The Furniture Department. It Was Announced In Some Papers As An Exhibition Opening, But The People Who Came Didn't Know That It Was To Be A Sort Of Happening. I Don't Think It Is Quite Right That It Has Become So Famous Anyhow. It Was Just A Lot Of Fun, And The Word Itself, Capitalist Realism, Hit Just Right. But It Wasn't Such A Big Deal.

Perhaps The Choice Is A Negative One, In That I Was Trying To Avoid Everything That Touched On Well-known Issues - Or Any Issues At All, Whether Painterly, Social Or Aesthetic. I Tried To Find Nothing Too Explicit, Hence All The Banal Subjects; And Then, Again, I Tried To Avoid Letting The Banal Turn Into My Issue And My Trademark. So It's All Evasive Action, In A Way.

Abstract Pictures Are Fictive Models, Because They Make Visible A Reality That We Can Neither See Nor Describe, But Whose Existence We Can Postulate.