Emmet Gowin, Barry and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970.

"The photograph gives a physical embodiment to our experience. We’re looking for something that puts our unspeakable feelings into a discreet form, so that we ourselves can back off and study what we’ve done. And in a sense, recognize our own feelings as an object."

"The object of the book is not only a storehouse of maps and symbolic terrains, but the book is in such a state of decay that it’s becoming a landscape. It is turning into a terrain. If the map can become a territory, it’s only because we privilege ourselves, we think of ourselves as being the only creatures, the only beings on the right scale. But on the level of a microorganism, the map was always a territory. And that scale became very important to me. If you circumnavigated the world and came right back to where you started—where you started was already exotic, and would have been more exotic to someone who was a stranger to that place. And I thought, “Ah, now this is a real clue, because I have to become a stranger to my own place."

"Truly, truly you couldn’t speak of discovery of the unknown unless you were unknowing. You have to make a room inside your own ego for what you don’t yet understand, and hold open the possibility that this is what you’re actually looking for. And that then becomes a very personal matter rather than a universal one, because you can’t account for what other people don’t know. "

"I like that [William] Blake equates evil with energy and exuberance, with life, and places the human task as the reconciliation of these two opposites. The energy which drives us which is good; and the evil which drives us is as much a part of us as the good. It was so clear to me that Blake’s personal vision was what he had to create because the world’s vision didn’t suit him. He would either have to rescind his own intimate vision to the world’s vision or make his own. And I thought that’s a so much better way to do it. Why give up what is living inside you for something you don’t understand or don’t feel, when in fact you’re already situated in a life that you feel intensely. So the world of science and the world of William Blake let me see.

go HERE for the interview in BOMB magazine.Winter '97