the tripod isn't a tripod as you know. think more of a steel construction, really rigid and heavy, that is attached to an open location in the building. it is always a different style tripod, and i have to plan for it to sit there "unremovable" for many years, which requires certain structural planning.

Have you ever come back to a project a few months later and found that the camera had been moved, or finally tried to develop a picture and have it not come out?

there has been little loss of images over all these years. but once in a while there are problems with the tripod, when the house is being renovated, for example. then all sorts of people run around the camera and touch it, hit it. this is why i also like to keep the construction a bit oversized, so that once you see the camera you get the feeling: "do not even try to think about moving me".

since i do so many other projects, it is very easy to forget about a camera for a while. but sometimes, in a quiet moment, i think about this or that camera. sometimes friends ask about certain places they have been (right now it's mostly at the moma construction site in nyc, where i have 8 cameras). then i return to the place out loud and also realize how fast time is passing.

How do you think the time that it takes to produce these pictures changes the way you perceive them? That is, how much does the long exposure time enable you to see what time does to the image and to you? Is there a time when you set up a photograph and something happened to change the meaning of the photograph for you?

i love collecting time, so these images give me a lot of satisfaction.

usually photography deals with the exposure time as something very aggressive, because it is about ripping something out of the flow of time. the click and action is very aggressive. in the "low end" photography I do, there is no decisive moment, no aggression, just a special light and a changed space. and this is a big part of my interest. and for that reason I consider my way to be soft and slow.

What are the emotional implications of your work?

everyone is kicked back to the basic questions of life: the fragility, our limited time frame in eternity. these concepts go along very easily with the images.

I like that regular life is "writing" the photograph. some lines are added every day and in the end it has a very precise logical appearance, even if it looks totally messed up. we cannot access this logical system, we can only guess. and this guessing is in large part the poetry that, for me, makes these images rich.

You seem to be on a project to shape visual culture. What are the political or social implications, if any, of the images you present?

if you analyze my work long enough, you will reach a level of moral understanding that is very important to me, but not very visible. in fact we all love images because of the voyeuristic qualities the medium gives us.

there are two main reasons we love photographs. one is the moral aspect: in real life no one can look at another person's face for more than a glimpse without being violating or aggressive, so photography is a tool that makes every detail accessible for an unlimited amount of time.

the other aspect is the time frame: the 1/100 of a second that it takes to make these moments is not accessible to us usually, since they are so short.

so the long exposure times especially, give other qualities to the images. people disappear, only the rigid stuff remains in focus, etc…so the less you see, the more has to happen in your head. these works are a lot about fantasy, individual fantasy, and not so much about voyeurism.

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