 Good evening, welcome to the Brooklyn Museum. I'm Cora Michael, Associate Curator for Exhibitions, and I'm pleased to present the second and a four-part conversation series pairing artists from the exhibition This Place with Notable Writers. Tonight, we are very fortunate to have photographer Stephen Shore and historian Ian Buruma with us to speak about Shore's iconic pictures of the American West and his more recent work from Galilee to the Negev, which explores the complexity of Israel and Palestine through landscape, portraits, and street photography. Some of the themes they will touch upon include the eternal resonance of the promised land, the unique energies that seem to emerge from the landscape, as well as how the present-day conflict leaves its mark on the place and its people. As a teenager, Stephen Shore was the resident photographer at Andy Warhol's factory. And in 1971, at the age of 23, he was the second living artist to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after Alfred Stieglitz. In the 1970s and 1980s, Shore pioneered the use of color photography as an art form. On road trips across the country, he captured the banality and beauty of everyday America chronicled in his collections, American surfaces, and uncommon places. As Lynn Tillman wrote, these works are about the importance, the fascination, and the beauty of ordinariness. Shore teaches photography at Bard College, where he is program director and Susan Weber professor in the arts at the photography program. He is one of 12 international artists whose photographs of Israel and the West Bank are featured in the exhibition, This Place, on view here until June 5th. Ian Baruma is a renowned journalist and historian who writes on a broad range of cultural and political subjects. Educated in Holland and Japan, he studied Japanese film and Chinese literature, and the art and culture of Asia remains one of his primary areas of scholarly expertise. Among his many publications are Murder in Amsterdam, the Death of Theo Van Gogh, and the Limits of Tolerance from 2006, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best current interest book, and Year Zero, a History of 1945, published in 2013. In 2008, Baruma was awarded the Erasmus Prize, which is awarded to an individual who has made an especially important contribution to culture, society, or social science in Europe. He has also written numerous articles and essays about Israel and Palestine for the New York Review of Books and Other Publications. His most recent book, My Promised Land, My Grandparents in Love and War, was published just last month by Penguin Books. He and Shore are colleagues at Bard, though I hear they don't know each other terribly well, where Baruma also teaches as Henry R. Loos Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism. Please join me in welcoming Stephen Shore and Ian Baruma. Well, I'll kick off with a question. It seems a long way from Andy Warhol's factory to the Desert of Hebron. And you've often spoken about the different phases of your photographic career in terms of finding new problems to solve. What were the artistic and perhaps non-artistic problems that you felt you were facing photographing Israel and Palestine? There were a series of them. One of them was a technical one, that sometimes if I need to revitalize my thinking, a new camera will do it. And the work that's in the show here is all taken with an 8x10 view camera, which is a camera I've been using regularly since the early 1970s. But I'm gonna show some pictures. Can we get the slideshow going? And some of the work you'll see, like this, is done with an 8x10, but some are done with a very high-end digital camera. And it offered an opportunity that I'd actually been looking for for probably 40 years, which is a small handheld camera that can take a picture with the same resolution as a 4x5 view camera. So I can have the detail and the tonality that I would expect from a large format camera, but have the spontaneity and mobility of a small camera. So that opened doors and allowed me to take pictures that I simply couldn't have taken before. But I think the more serious questions, I've tended up to them now to photograph with a few exceptions in North America, not in politically charged areas. And this presented a situation where there was clearly a political charge. I had to deal with, to what extent do I show it? And what is the scope that I wanna cover? So the challenge, the real, the aesthetic problem was one of content. And how do I make sense of this large, complex place? I think being part of this project was in a way a godsend because there were 11 other photographers, I didn't feel like I had to make a summation that I knew other people were doing other work and that would all be in a show and fit into a complex whole. And that took a certain kind of pressure off. But I wanted to show, when I read about Israel on the West Bank in the paper, it's always about the conflict. But for people who live there, their life is a lot more than that. And their life involves the conflict, but it's also life. And I wanted to show that. I wanted to show the land and I wanted to show what average life is like. And that sort of became my aim and that was the problem for me. Yes, did that force you into a kind of departure from something that's characterized your work, I think, in that you once said about Robert Frank, who did the famous book, The Americans, that perhaps in contrast to somebody who I think influenced you a lot, Ansel Adams, that Frank had a kind of biting, almost satirical look at America, which you called, I think, in an interview, a sort of critical stance. It was, you might describe it as a sort of horrified fascination, even. Whereas I think Ansel Adams and a lot of your own work tends to be much cooler and takes things as they are. I'm sorry? You may be thinking of Warholesque. Warholesque. I mean, it's not a horrified fascination. It's simply sort of photographing what's there. Did a politically charged place like Israel change that attitude to photography? I found not, and I think maybe that's why I wanted to put the pictures of places where the political situation was more evident into a larger context. Because I didn't want it to be just about. I mean, I could have, as I'm talking, I'm thinking about, and you'll see a series of pictures that I'll be showing in a little while, of Hebron. You can describe a political situation in words and make it clear, maybe not deal with whole complexity in a few sentences, but make it clear in a few sentences. But you can't photograph that. And so you can only photograph where things become visibly manifest. And for me, that place was Hebron, where the conflict really became visible to an observer, and you could see the tension was there in physical form. But it seemed important to me not to just concentrate on that, that it's a small part of a larger whole, which is that it's a small part of a larger life. Yes, I can see that. On the other hand, in a place like Israel, almost everything is politically charged. For example, you've taken pictures that you were just telling me, as we were chatting on the way in, that your first trip to Israel, you went there because you were interested in archeology. And you took photographs of archeological sites and shards and pots and that kind of thing, which seemed to be completely unpolitical. I mean, there's nothing political about it. It seems. On the other hand, it's also true that Moshe Dayan and the other general, Iqdal, I've written it down. Sorry? Yes. Yes, that they were both very keen archeologists party because they were interested in archeology. But there was a political agenda, which was to sort of stake a claim on the Jewish or the Jewish claim on the soil. And so even that isn't really completely unpolitical. No, there were a number of levels of politicization of the archeological digs. For example, in the book, I have edited out one picture, which is of human remains. Because I know that if I published it, it would get the dig in trouble because there are groups who would close them down. The ultra-orthodox. Yes. Also, I know that in one of the digs I was on, there was really a subtext of wanting to find archeological proof of the Torah. And the other books of the Old Testament. And that this was on the minds of the archeologists. So how can one, on the one hand, photograph scenes that are charged and without sort of necessarily commenting politically on it, but how do you visualize it? For example, the landscape itself, a lot of your photographs, I'm thinking, for example, the pictures you took, the very beautiful pictures you took in Scotland. And it seems like a landscape that is almost primeval, that's not touched by man. Of course, almost all landscape in the world has been touched by man in one way or another. But it seems that you don't see the footprint of man. And yet... But you see the footprint of lamb. Of lamb, certainly. And of history. And I wonder how one visualizes that. For example, and I don't want to draw any comparisons historically at all between what I'm about to say and the pictures of the West Bank. But I remember traveling in a train through the forests in Poland on the way to Lublin, where there was a very horrible death camp. And you know that all kinds of terrible things happened in that landscape or in Lithuania for the same thing. And you sort of have to resist the notion that the landscape itself is guilty. Now does that come into your attitude when you photograph a landscape, and the presence of history? As you're saying that, I think not so much in this project as the next project I did was in Ukraine. And I felt that completely. And I made a couple of trips there. And the second trip I wondered before I left, am I gonna feel this again? And it felt like there was this emotion hanging over the land. And I can't separate it from my knowledge that my paternal grandfather emigrated from there. That before I ever went there, I had read Thomas Snyder and knew the history of the, I mean the extraordinarily tragic history of that country. I can't separate all that from it, but I'm convinced that it was just like something in the air in Ukraine. And do you think it comes out in, it's something that somehow comes out in photographs or in the way one visualizes these? How would you describe it? Photography is I think surprisingly adept at communicating psychological and emotional states of the photographer. If someone is put in years of practice and as some degree of mastery of the medium, it seems to be able to communicate it. And that's, as we were talking about the problems of content in Israel, I had to face it even more so when I was working in Ukraine because the work was centered around photographing Holocaust survivors and their homes and the villages they lived in. And I went in knowing that I'm doing something that contains a red flag, that there's this cultural charge. I say the word Holocaust and immediately fireworks go off. And I don't wanna take pictures that are manipulative. And that play on that, I don't wanna be a Holocaust tourist. So I just trust that to take clean, direct pictures and that I'm just trusting that somehow that cloud of emotion that I felt every single day that I was in Ukraine, somehow is gonna find its way into the pictures. Yes, and I can imagine it being the same in Poland, that there's something about maybe that part of Eastern Europe. And it is, of course, in our minds, isn't it? Because famously, nature is indifferent to the terrible things that people do. And I mean, while people are being murdered in death camps, the birds were chirping away and so on. So it is in the mind. And so it's very interesting what you say. So that what's in the mind of the photographer somehow translates even in a photograph, which is a kind of reproduction of reality. Yeah, and it's not hard to see why that's the case. That the decisions I make as a photographer are based on what I'm paying attention to. And so something very simple, that if I'm in a state of mind where I'm seeing, my mind is quiet and I'm seeing things with greater vividness, I will choose intuitively to photograph from a slightly different angle, because I'm aware of the light. And that I would gravitate to an angle where the light will communicate a greater sense of vividness. And that's not even talking about an emotional level, just what I would gravitate to to photograph is gonna communicate it. What else I include in the picture? How close I am? Little things like slight variation in distance changes the emotional tenor, the saver of a picture. And again, I don't think one has to set out with that as a name, but that, again, with years of practice, when the medium becomes second nature, I feel a photographer can trust that that will come through. Do you think, in a sense, also perhaps your approach, your sort of distant and dispassionate almost approach, can actually make the political sense even more dramatic or even sharper? I'm thinking, for example, of one of the pictures in the exhibition, which is a sort of panoramic view or view from above of Hebron. And if you don't look carefully, it just looks like a very rather nice picture of Middle Eastern city. And actually this is another view of a street level view of that same place. That's right, but if you look carefully, you see a wall, you see barbed wire and you see a place where the military would be there with guns. But it's almost as though it's a banal scene. It almost makes that seem as normal as all the houses around it, where of course it's not at all normal. It's a scene that's utterly abnormal. And yet the fact that it's shown in the same way that perhaps you show in other pictures of the United States, of a freeway somewhere in Texas with a Texaco sign or something, makes it even chillier in a way. Is that something that you feel yourself? Yes, and I think another side of that is that I find that if I feel that someone is trying to manipulate me, I back off of me, like I close down inside. Kind of protect myself from it. And so it's the work that seems striving less that may be the more powerful, at least for me as a viewer. And where the pictures that you took of Hebron are almost all done from the Arab side? They were done from the Israeli settlement side. So you see the Arab parts, but across the wall, as it were. Yes. And was that deliberate? Or? The first time I went to Hebron, I spent most of the time in the Arab part and had one small group of pictures in the book from that. But when you're in it, it's not that different from other Arab cities, other West Bank cities. What seemed particularly striking was that, as I mentioned, this was the place where I could take a picture like the one you're describing. And you can begin to read the picture and see, literally see the tension of the conflict. It made visible. And so it was from that side where it seemed clearest. Can you also perhaps speak a little bit about something you mentioned already, but elaborate a bit on the very peculiar light that I myself also saw on the West Bank, and especially in the landscape around Hebron. Yeah. And compare it to the light that you get in, say, the Southwest of the United States, which has somewhat similar landscape, although obviously not the same. Yeah. Well, I'm not sure you can even separate the light from the landscape. I found the landscape, particularly in the West Bank and the Galilee, extraordinarily powerful. I found myself deeply attracted to the land, that there was something that felt special about it. In lots of different places there. But I'll tell you a story about the light. So I worked over about a, maybe a four or five year period. I made six trips. And the other photographers did the same and we would share assistance. And the assistant I used also worked with Thomas Strudt. And on my second or third trip, he said, something funny I noticed that if you, speaking to me, I'm photographing in the desert, and there's one little stray cloud that's covering the sun, he said, I've noticed you'll just stand there and wait for the cloud to pass. And he said, Strudt was the exact opposite, that he would set up, and then of course, this is a desert country, and he would wait for however long it takes for a cloud to come and cover the sun. And I said, well, it's simple. He grew up in Northern Europe and I grew up in the States. I figured out how to photograph in bright sunlight and he learned how to photograph in overcast. Yes, you could turn that round though, that it's also possible to think that to a European bright sunlight, a Northern European would be more exotic and therefore more appealing. We were talking earlier about the American landscape and I remember the only time, and I've lived in Japan and I've traveled all over Asia and so on, and the only time I've ever felt culture shock in my life was when I saw, for the first time when I was 19, I saw Los Angeles. And I'd seen it in the movies, but it was a city like no other I'd ever seen in my life. It was so peculiar and strange. I liked it, but it was really odd. And you were telling me that as a New Yorker, it was almost as exotic to you, the world of America. Yeah, we were talking before while we were waiting to come up here about that we had similar experiences reading Nabokov's description of Humbert Humbert's trip across America and the song Root 66. The almost incantational quality of the names of the cities and how they were magical. And they were magical for Ian growing up in the Netherlands and magical for me growing up in New York and probably equally exotic. Yes, and very utterly misleading because to us the name Memphis was almost as sort of exotic as the real Memphis. Whereas it's in fact probably a rather dreary city, but and if you look at your photographs, you do I think maybe because you are that's the difference between being an American photographer and the European one to come back to Robert Frank. The European tendency is to play up the satirical side of the American landscape to make it look weirder than it actually even is and more absurd and surreal and so. Whereas it seems to me you did the opposite. You de-exalticized it in some ways. How aware were you when you did that of this? I find them basically fascinated by the way things are. My current project, my project for the past almost two years is posting every day on Instagram. I mean it's devolved from high art to that. And occasionally I take pictures of skies and today I posted a very dramatic sky, but I'm also looking through and I have pictures that are just very ordinary clouds and which I'll occasionally post and I think what I'm doing and I'm thinking why is there a prohibition against ordinary skies? Why do clouds have to be dramatic? And I think it's symbolic of an approach I have about a lot of things and we were talking earlier also and you mentioned the work I had done in the Northern Italian village of Luzara. And when I was there it was exactly to the month, 40 years after Paul Strand had photographed the same village for his book Un Paese. Not that I was meant to do a re-photographic survey of his book, but it was really a coincidence that it was exactly 40 years. And an Italian photo historian named Paolo Constantini sent me a copy of a letter that Strand had written while he was in Luzara and he said, it's so difficult to photograph here because there are no buildings of architectural interest. And it really struck me how different the words architectural interests were for him than they are for me and for him it meant a building designed by a noted architect or that communicated the humanity of a peasant and for me architectural interest refers back in a way to what I was saying about the conflict that as a photographer I'm limited to how cultural forces show themselves visibly that are accessible to a camera and one of the ways cultural forces show themselves is in architecture. And so I find the most average architecture fascinating because I see in it this bubbling up of these cultural forces. And this is where I can deal with it as a photographer and it doesn't have to be the work of a great architect and it's not that I'm being ironic about it because it's simply this is where it's made manifest. No, in fact it's unironic and I was thinking also when I was looking at some pictures that you did on trips through America of things like the breakfast you'd had and you see a table with leftovers of a scrambled egg. And it's very, very different from say the pictures taken by somebody like Martin Parr who's done a whole book I think on fast food and people eating fast food and so on. And he's in his photographs not only is the irony very thick but they're almost all made to look grotesque whereas your leftover scrambled eggs look like leftover scrambled eggs. And that which is clearly intentional. Yes. But I could see how in the 60s and 70s and so when you began to photograph in this way this was real. I'm smiling because I'm thinking of something that I'm trying to think should I say it? Yes, say it. Or shouldn't I say it? No, no you should say it. There's a photographer in the show in the show that's up here now named Fuzzle Shake who's a friend of mine and a wonderful photographer. And we were both in a show at the Tate Modern called Cruel and Tender. It was the first photography show that the Tate had. And the joke among the photographers was that Fuzzle wasn't cruel and Martin wasn't tender. Which is essentially what you're saying. Yes. No, that is what I'm saying. But the warholesque sort of almost celebration of the ordinary was a real artistic statement at one point. I mean nobody had quite done that before. How does this change and how does the whole, I know this is a very big question but how does the role of the sort of art photographer change or how has it already changed in the world of Instagram when everybody is a photographer and most people are not good enough not to take pictures that are banal. So where does it affect the kind of work that you've done? So a fascinating question. I mean I've been thinking a lot about Instagram and do you remember Essex 70s? No. It was a Polaroid camera about 40 years ago and it produced prints that are about this big and there were certain, Walker Evans spent some time toward the end of his life using Essex 70 and there was something about the process that allowed for kind of quick notations like I'm looking at the way the air bubbles are in this glass and that's good enough for a little Essex 70 and I wouldn't take out my eight by 10 and do it it's not complex enough for it but it's a little notation and Instagram does much of the same thing and for me that's part of the joy of Instagram. You know, everyone is a photographer now but for years everyone was a writer. Not quite everyone. Well, everyone wrote. Yes, that's true. But not everyone was a good writer. It was a good writer. No, but. And so now photography is in the same boat that writing is in. It's a skill that has become universal where 30 years ago or 40 years ago it wasn't universal but writing has been universal at least in Western culture for a very long time. No, that is absolutely true but it's clearly the case that not every Instagram photographer is going to come up with pictures like Cartier-Bresson. I mean it's impossible. And in some ways it seems maybe I'm completely wrong about this and please tell me if I am but looking at your work it seems to me your work is less about catching the fleeting moment which was Cartier-Bresson. It's the fleeting scene almost. And you say somewhere that you knew how to be a really good photographer. You had the technique, you knew you were good in the way that most people are not. And then you almost deliberately took pictures like that wonderful series of postcards of very banal things like banks in Texas and so on. And it's very deceptive because they almost look like real postcards like that which also exists. You used to, hotels used to hand them out. They are real postcards. Yeah, they are real postcards. So what is fascinating there is that very subtle borderline because between an artistic expression of something and something that is, let's call it naive. You did it because you knew you had the skill but you did something very strange, peculiar at the time with it. Now that must change, well one's perception of that approach to photography must change when everybody can do something that looks like that even if it isn't quite the same. You're right, I hadn't thought of that but you're absolutely right. And so for myself there are certain Instagram cliches that have developed and I will either avoid them or take pictures that intentionally play on them. Could it mean a return? But it's something else I wanna add that's even sillier than Instagram and it's a camera called a cat cam. And I suggest anyone go home and Google who phrase cat cam and it's a very lightweight German camera that goes on to a pet's collar and can be set to take pictures at intervals like every minute or every two minutes. And some of the pictures are wonderful, absolutely wonderful. And when I first saw it, it was really depressing actually because I've devoted 30 years of my life to teaching and I think, okay, after four years if these students that I've been teaching can't take a better picture than essentially a random photograph, what does it all mean? Well, it's a good question. But we've always known that if you give a camera to a monkey, it's perfectly possible that they'll come up with at least one rarely arresting image. What is difficult is for the same monkey to repeat arresting images and for that you do have to be a photographer with a mind, with a brain and who can actually do this stuff. Yes, I agree, yes. But nonetheless, I mean, do you think- But it gave me pause for a little while but I realized exactly what you were saying. But do you think it could mean for people who practice photography as an art form that it could move back to doing things that are technically too difficult for most amateurs so that they can distinguish? It raises, what you're saying raises something which is partially behind the cat cam which is that to, I mentioned writing before but to be able to write, as I'm saying it I understand there are some people who are illiterate not that many in our culture but it is a skill that has to be learned simply how to write and read. Taking a picture is easier and especially with cameras that are autofocus, auto exposure, in every formal sense it is a complete picture. I mean, a monkey or in this case a cat can take a picture that in any formal sense is complete. It has edges, it has a plane of focus, it has content, it's well exposed, it's in focus. It's the easiest medium to create something. So there's never been that high technical barrier and even before the automatic camera it really is so easy to learn compared to a skill like reading. So it's always been something else. It's always been the mind and how you see. And I think what attracted me or struck me about the cat cam is that it's a picture made without any presence of visual convention and that's what as artists one of the things we have to struggle with is how do we polish ourselves and scour those conventions out of ourselves to see the world more clearly and immediately and immediately meaning without mediation. Yes, and I think that well there's one other way in which you can compare it to writing which is that not every great writer was a really good writer as it were. I mean you can be a very average stylist but have something to say about yourself and life and so on that is so interesting that it doesn't really matter and you have great stylists who can write beautiful sentences and so on who don't have all that much to say. And I suppose the same is true of photography that there are a lot of photographers especially now who, some of whom I don't particularly like but who are popular not because of the technical quality of their pictures which are often deliberately badly photographed. Wolfgang Tilmann said seems to me as an example but who people like because he has something to say about his life, it's a chronicle of an attitude of a life and so on. And for that I suppose, I mean that can be an art form in itself, would you put yourself or at least part of your work in that camp and that you were at certain phases of your career interested primarily in photography as a sort of a chronicle of the life you were living at the time? Yes, especially the series American Surfaces. It was essentially a visual diary. It was very much that. And there have been times during my Instagram work that it becomes somewhat more autobiographical and then I'll kind of move away and make it less so. But there are periods where I'll take lots of pictures that are very personal. Do you think that's a matter of age? That young artists, I mean famously the first novel tends to be autobiographical but that young artists are more interested in chronicling their life than when you get older and then you just go on to other things or do you think that's entirely a personal individual thing and I think it was age? I think it was individual. Where are you now in that sense? I kind of waver in between. And so again, really all I've been doing recently is Instagram. And so as I look at it I see that I'm taking some pictures that are the notational pictures. I'm taking some that are I think as complex as my eight by 10 work. I take some that are very personal and are just kind of diaristic. Three days ago I took a picture of my wife having a nap with our cat. And it's very unironic, very personal, very sweet image. Today I've posted a kind of slightly dramatic sky picture but it's nothing I would have ever photographed with a larger camera. Sky pictures are kind of cliche and you can get away with it on Instagram but I wouldn't have. How is that related to the way photographs are displayed? For example, if you take a picture with a large format camera of an Israeli landscape that obviously looks very good on a museum wall. It's wonderful here. Do you think that photographs will be displayed and distributed in a completely different way with digital media and Instagram and so on? Or do you think those Instagram pictures could be made to look good on a museum wall as well? I think some could but I think the people who tend to use Instagram the best visually are thinking about what a picture looks like about two by two or three by three inches. And so are photographing in a way that looks good on a phone or on a largest on an iPad. And that's very different from what, in the show here there's a Jeff Wall that the size of that, almost the size of that image. You know the question. And so there are different things that you would, different approaches you would take knowing that this is the size it's gonna be. Also it's a rear projection screen and different things look work on that than would work on a print. So it's, you're seeing it by transmitted light rather than reflected light. And so the physical quality of the image on a phone is part of what, at least I'm taking into account and I think a lot of the people who are using Instagram as a medium are taking into account. How can photographers in our age make a living and in the sense that it used to be that photographers can make a living by taking pictures for magazines, annual reports, books. Then it moved into the art world and some photographers made huge amounts of money creating works of art for museums and collectors and so on. The photography of the Instagram. I have not that dear. This is gonna be very difficult. I did a small book but I didn't get anything for the book and I don't know why anyone would buy it. They wanted to see my Instagram pictures. They just, the feed is public. It's not just a question of a photography of course, but let me get back to Israel a little bit and the role that your own life plays in your work and so on. Did Israel ever mean anything special to you where you as a boy made to pay your pocket money for trees to be planted in the Holy Land or was it something that left you fairly indifferent? What role did it play? It played a very little role. I had an uncle for whom it was important as I heard things from him about it. But not much role. And when I first went there on the archeological digs, I was just struck by the tension and the anger and I don't mean between Palestinians and Israelis. I mean between ultra-Orthodox and reform. And I mean, I was staying outside of Zfat for the hot-sword dig and at a guest house that all the people in the dig were in and an ultra-Orthodox man came up to me and was almost hitting me. That I would live under the same roof as a Gentile. I saw fights break out in the church of the Holy Sepulcher between religious people of two different Christian denominations. The first day I was there, I arrived on a Friday morning and the next day cars were being stoned who were breaking the Sabbath driving through Meir Shireem, which is an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. It was just, I mean, I don't know what I was expecting. I mean, I'd read about other tensions going on but that there was this undercurrent of anger. I was unprepared for it but also at that same time it was before the Intifada and there was no fence and there was no even demarcation between Israel and the West Bank and I would drive around and I wouldn't, I'd have to reach signs to figure out whether I was in a Palestinian village or an Israeli village and so the access to the Haram al-Sharif and the Dome of the Rock was completely open and so at that point there was in fact less tension. Between the Palestinians and the Israelis. What kind of family did you grow up in? And Israel played no part in your childhood, you say, but to what extent, so there is no real connection between coming from a Jewish family and photographing in Israel? I would say that I was probably in a family where not unlike many others in New York at the time where Judaism was more of a cultural thing than a religious thing where we would go to synagogue on the High Holy Days. Almost all of my parents' friends were Jewish, we would. But occasional Yiddish words were used in the house but it was more cultural. But I think often when in Jewish families where Judaism has become more cultural than religious, especially in the United States, perhaps Israel takes a larger role because in some ways it replaces religious feeling as a focus of loyalty. Yeah, it wasn't the case. That didn't happen in my part of the family. I mean, as I've spent time there, the country has meant more and more to me. And I've looked back on trying to figure out what was going on in my family at the time. But I was young and it's hard, I'm not sure I have that many memories but I think about what it's like for a Western Jew in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and what effect does this have? Does it make you want to proclaim your faith more or do you want to keep your head down? And I think people have gone different ways. And in your family environment, there wasn't a question of keeping any heads down, presumably. No, but there was also not, there was not a strong claiming to the faith. Although I went to a religious school every week and what I found later in my life was that as I re-experience different traditions that the seeds of all these memories are all implanted and that even the melodies used for certain prayers and were kind of deeply burned in. So somehow, even though, I wouldn't say my family was particularly religious, I was exposed enough so that there was this trace, more than a trace, a foundation that I think was there to be reawakened. I suppose what I'm getting at is whether there is names like Jerusalem, Hebron, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and so on, in some ways have the same almost mystical exoticism that Amarillo and Memphis and Nashville and so on had for us growing up with pop songs about it. I mean, was there a resonance there that made you feel that it was compelling to photograph? Amarillo always had more of a resonance. Then Hebron. Yes. But the first time I drove around and I wasn't looking for those resonances, but I'd come to Jericho and I think, oh my God, here I am in Jericho, or Megidda. But in the country so small that this, you would come across many of these in the day of driving. And so I wasn't, as I said, looking for that resonance, I wasn't seeking it out because it meant, but the names are just in our culture, carmel. It's just, it's all over our culture. Well, it's all over America too, as is carmel. Yes, yes. And probably Jericho, there's probably a Jericho, Texas, somewhere. And so you wouldn't have probably photographed Israel in this manner if the project hadn't come to you. I wouldn't have, and I'm just very glad. How did that happen? Frederick Brenner approached me and asked if I would be interested. And it's not every point in artist development when a project coming to them is coming at the right time. And I just felt immediately that I needed to have some input from the outside, rather than follow my own instincts. Sometimes it's very useful, again, coming back to your first question about problem solving, to have someone else propose the problem. Can kind of shake some of the mold off. And I just immediately felt that this was right. Are there other places that you feel that you'd love to go and photograph other countries or would you like to go back to the kind of landscapes that you photographed in the 70s and 80s in the United States to sort of change? I actually tried it last year, did a cross-country trip, which was, I did a very short one, it was about a week and a half, but it was just tremendous fun. And I was struck by just how endlessly beautiful the American landscape is and how varied it is. But where would I wanna go? The place that somehow is, sometimes I pick places that I've never been and don't know really much about and don't know why I wanna pick them, like Scotland. And the place that is sort of in my mind is Uzbekistan. Why Uzbekistan? I think the main thing is whenever I see pictures of old Islamic architecture there, it's just amazing. But as I've looked into it more, the, well, also spending time in Ukraine and seeing the Soviet architecture, that the contrast is striking. And I don't know why, I would go to find out. Have you ever been there? I've never been to Uzbekistan, the name is wonderful. I'm a great believer in names. Tristan Dakhunha, an island, it must be a great place. I mean, how can it fail with a name like that? Uzbekistan, I feel. Are there places you wanna go? Yeah, Iran, I'd love to go. But it's silly to say that and not go. I mean, one should just go. I think on that note where unless there's something more you'd like to, well, there's one more question. You talk about the beauty of the American landscape when you went back, your photographs of the landscape are very compelling, but the ones that really stick in my mind are of the urban landscape in America and not the great cities, but the sort of the sprawl around the provincial urban America. To what extent has that changed since you first started traveling? You know, on this trip that I did a year and a half ago, one of the things that struck me is how little things have changed. Strips have changed to some extent. When I was first photographing in the 70s, just when commercial strips started being developed, but they had already happened. The one thing that didn't happen was the big box store, and that's new. The other change is the quality of food. You cannot imagine how terrible the food was in the 70s outside of a few cities. I mean, it was just unbelievably bad, and now you can get good meals just about everywhere. Yes, I think that's true. The same is true in Britain, perhaps even more so. But on that note, I think we can conclude.