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>6. The American landscape contains signs that maybe we in Europe aren’t able to identify easily. We are very fascinated by the incredible differences between the North and the South, the East and West. Every place has a particularity; every landscape is full of meanings and stories. What does it mean for you to photograph in the South of the United States?
MS: Yes, thankfully there are still wonderful and exciting differences between places. I just took a road trip to Los Angeles and the West is a blast! I love being out in the desert. Of course the differences that still remain between places are diminishing. Our conformist corporate culture is constantly persuading us that our needs are all the same and this conformity is taking us to a place of apathy and complacency. (Check out a great travelogue on America written sixty years ago by Henry Miller - "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.") I like to stress the poetry and ambience of a place, while still trying to be truthful. The South has many great writers - William Faulkner, Flannery O' Connor, Carson McCullers - and they've influenced me, and there are great musicians too. Most contemporary photographers of the South I think go a bit overboard in making the South seem like an overly gothic, romantic place, though there might be a few photographers who go overboard in the opposite direction by depicting the American South through a "new topographic" prism that makes it seem indistinguishable from, say, the Belgian/German border. I love the South for the weeds growing through the cracks of its sidewalks, for its humidity and for its chaos.
