Funnily enough, I never think of it as portraiture. Starting way back from the very beginning. . . I’ve lectured about this, and it takes kind of a long time to show the progression. It was a slow stepping stone of wanting to say something very specific. I had a narrative in mind. That was the thing that was so kind of historical really, in the beginning of stage photography that happened in the ’80s. It came about with really kind of the frustration of really trying to say something. Prior to that you had the street photographers, Gary Winter Grand, Leif Freelander, who would never alter anything whatsoever or tell somebody to do something for the sake of the narrative. To break that kind of rigor, or it was almost like a law, was a big deal. So I basically said for somebody to move from some place to the next, in order to say something. And because I was so interested in making a very complicated structure or composition. Because in learning about painting, from the Italian Renaissance painters to the Dutch 17th-century painters, they worked so hard in trying to bring the viewer into the work of art to make it interesting. So both those things together I definitely was constructing or directing from the very beginning.

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