Confuse the Issue is the scrambled message spray painted on the back of my suit jacket, worn in the attic space of Tom and Mark's house in Northampton, Mass., in Fall 1977. Mark was an avid photographer; there is a section of the Deleted/Extra Scenes on the dvd of the documentary, Silverlake Life, describing Bo Huston and Elaine Mayes going through a cache of photos after Mark had followed Tom in passing from HIV. Mark and I shot lots of the Land Camera Polaroids, and I first began the SX70 self-portraits in my bedroom at their home that fall."The pictures weren't good, but it was fun to operate. It was expensive as well, but you didn't have to wait, any reality could be handed back to you at once, in reduced form. Polaroid was initially marketed as a child's toy, though it was an instrument for pornography: it freed the amateur from the constraint of the laboratory....
"It was also suggested that ... photographers work on themes, the self-portrait for example, since the Polaroid lent itself well to this solitary activity--there were no witnesses, and one had total control over the image and over what one wanted to leave behind as image."
(pgs 130-131, translated by R. Bononno, Green Integer 17, 1998)
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