Q: How were these pieces made?

Most of the pictures were made using a print process I've been developing over the past few years. I shoot digital photos, convert the files into life-sized digital negatives, segment those negs and print them on 8.5" by 11" transparencies, collage the transparencies back into full figures and then contact print the collaged negatives using the cyanotype process. I also make cyanotype pictures at the size of single acetate sheets - mostly variants of my larger pieces and photos that ride a line between amateur snapshots and classic straight photography. Everything is done using common materials and tools: overhead transparencies, point-and-shoot cameras, laser printers and sunlight. I like cyanotype because it's cheap, it's easy and it has a dubious modern pedigree.

A couple of the newest pictures here deviate from the method I've described. They're digital silver prints, and the source images are unmanipulated files made with a digital camera I constructed. The figurative distortions in these pictures aren't Photoshop effects: they're the result of movements - performances - made during the camera's slow exposures.

Q: What's the significance of the title of this body of work, Basic or Boring Pictures?

Lately, the phrase "the violent return of the subject" has been running through my mind. Exactly those words. I take this to mean that -- despite my interest in form, method and technique -- bare subject matter has forced itself to the surface of my art. I no longer prioritize the crafting of subtle reflections between my materials and depicted subjects, or try to foreground resonances between my work and a historical past (which are, I think, the academic ways of making pictures nowadays). Maybe that's because I've arrived at a studio method I can take as a given. Or maybe it's because I feel a strong pressure to make pictures of my fantasies, my world, whatever. Maybe I now see the everyday as stripped down to its epic dimensions. That's the violent return of the subject.

Q: But what about the title?

The pictures show moments where the bestial and the human overlap or separate, mundane events that make civilization. Those moments are basic, and / or they're boring.