Joe Deal
[Photographer, b. 1947, Topeka, Kansas, d. 2010, Providence, Rhode Island.]
My work is about the transformation of the landscape. My interest is in the boundaries—the lines of tension—between the environment and the construction of culture.
The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions concerning it.
In making these photographs I attempted to make a series of images in which one image is equal in weight or appearance to another. Many of the conscious decisions made while the series was evolving had to do with denying the uniqueness in the subject matter in one exposure as opposed to another in the belief that the most extraordinary images might be the most prosaic.
(On his landscape photographs in the New Topographics exhibition.)
