- When you go back in time, when you dig deep into your work, you're often surprised.

What was once an exposure, 250 at eight, is now a historical moment of a person, place, or thing.

But is that enough?

Doesn't what's in the frame need to be a good photograph as well?

Time is marked in silver, time is captured.

Time is on your side, or is it?

Time does not heal all wounds.

Time captured in light keeps those wounds fresh, like the day you made them, like the day you got them.

The Leica is a small camera.

It fits in my hand, snugly in my hand.

And the M2 was the camera that I chose to use in 1974.

It was my first camera, and it's still my working tool.

I do have other cameras.

In the theater, I worked with an M3 and a 50 millimeter lens, but on the street, I often work with the M2, and sometimes now, I use an M6.

But the camera was the perfect tool for me because it was small, it was an intimate, it was quiet, and people didn't really notice it because it doesn't have a big lens or a large presence.

So it was easy for me to have it with me all the time.

And as a young photographer, Hank Wessel, who was my teacher at the Art Institute, always had his camera on.

And he told us back in the day that if you're not going to have your camera with you, you're gonna miss something.

So I took that to heart, and I always travel with my camera.

I might have it on all day and not lift it up to my eye, but it's part of my personality, it's part of who I am.

It's an accessory, like a belt or a pair of shoes.

I'm really influenced by illustration, black and white drawings.

And so, the black and white camera, the black and white film, seemed to make sense to me.

And as I went on, color was not that interesting to me.

When I go out to photograph, I don't really go out to photograph.

I go out to do my day, and if I'm going someplace, I have my camera with me.

And I'm not interested in setting things up, or making people go certain places or do certain things, or moving objects around.

I'm not really interested in that.

I'm more interested in discovering, having the unfolding happen before me as I walk through whatever activity I might be doing, whatever my day brings.

Polk Street, which is where I ended up living after moving around for a while, was in its heyday, and... gay pride was starting to become a word, a term, a feeling, a place of being that we hadn't experienced before.

Coincidentally, when I was photographing once, in Dolores Park, I ran out of film and I went to a camera shop, and that's where I met Harvey Milk.

And he pretty much changed my life.

And when he was shot dead by Dan White, along with George Moscone in the November of 1978, having moved to San Francisco in '73, in '78, I just felt like I didn't wanna live there anymore.

Because it seemed like every time you turned around, Joan Baez was singing in the streets for something.

Harvey Milk, Jonestown.

I just, I had to leave, I had to go back east.

In the fall of '78, I took a train to Peekskill and I photographed the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

And then when the accident at Harrisburg happened on March 28, 1979, I decided that I hadn't gotten on that train just as a coincidence, that I had gotten on that train for a reason, and I became very involved with the anti-nuclear movement.

AIDS activism, by being part of ACT UP's... actions that they had, and also, at the same time, the women's movement was being challenged again, abortion was being challenged again.

So we had two things happening at the same time.

Women and men, both vulnerable to healthcare.

And the camera was just a way of putting myself in a situation where I could photograph and maybe be useful, maybe take a picture that could, that could change the way we looked at the world.

Most of the time, the pictures just sat in a folder, to be discovered later on in my darkroom.

One day in the new century, I got a DM from a friend on Instagram.

I had posted the photograph, and the friend wrote, "Do you know who that man is holding up "the black coffin in the center of your photograph?"

"I did not," I texted back, though I felt like I did.

He had been in silver all this time.

"He's Assotto Saint," my friend explained.

"The Haitian-born performer, director, poet, AIDS activist.

"He danced with Martha Graham."

"Great," I wrote back.

"I'd like to send him a print, the photograph."

"You can't," he replied.

Assotto died of AIDS in 1994.

He was 36 years old.

I started to go out to the Far Rockaways and teaching a workshop.

And I noticed that most of the folks liked having their picture taken, but they didn't necessarily warm up to the cameras.

So I started to bring in pictures, and I also started to do visual art with them.

So we had this hobnob table of pictures that I had made, pictures and contact sheets, edits that they had made, and lots of visual arts material.

And then one day, in Coney Island, where I worked for almost 15 years, a woman named Jane Smith took a colored pencil, or a magic marker, I'm not sure what it was, and started coloring on one of the photographs that I had brought in that day.

And that's how the hand-colored photograph series started.

And when I was in West Virginia, I was thinking about what I might wanna do.

And so I joined this organization, and through this organization, I met a tremendous amount of women and started to photograph elder women, and men, but mostly women, because women live longer than men.

So I photographed Lottie Christian looking out the window in her home place.

I photographed Georgie Hurd milking her cows.

And that day I photographed Georgie Hurd, she got dressed up to go out and milk cows in the barn, and she had these little white go-go boots on.

In 1984, very early in my tenure at PS122, I photographed a performance called "24 Hours."

And it was Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks, and it literally was 24 hours.

She started at 8PM, and she ended 24 hours later.

And I was able to photograph the performances, go upstairs, process the film, and make contact sheets, bring them down, and attach them to the columns at PS122, which was kind of an amazing experience when you think about that.

How much time lapsed, and how people were so tired at the end of 24 hours, but still, still really energized.

And in the course of my time there, I photographed, you know, my friends, Tim, Tim Miller, John Bernd, Beth Lapides, many, many people, but then I made new friends.

I made new friends because they were in the community and they were performing.

So I was very fortunate enough to be able to finally meet and photograph Meredith Monk, who I had heard sing at St. Mark's Church way back in 1978, whose performance completely changed the way I thought about the live arts.

I was the photographer who photographed the NEA Four, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck.

The NEA Four were just a few of the artists whose work was being challenged during the culture wars.

There were many, many others.

There was a lot of artists who were on the periphery of PS122 that didn't necessarily perform there but still were my friends.

But this particular group of artists, this particular case, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and we lost eight to one.

When I met Brad Kessler, and we started living together in my apartment on Ninth Street, 348 East Ninth Street, he was really unhappy.

He didn't really like the city.

He was more of a country guy.

And so we started to think about where we could go that would enable us to still maybe be in New York so we could work and make money, but be far enough away so that we could do something else.

The guidelines for us finding a place was that it had to be a dead-end road, cat-safe road, and Brad needed to be able to go outside naked.

Those were the searching features that we were searching for when we were looking for a house.

And the goats, the goats didn't really show up until 2005.

And Brad wrote a book called "Goat Song," and I remember when the book came out in 2010 or '11, people said, "Well, are you gonna get rid of the goats now?

"Because, you know, you've created this project, "and you've got a book now."

And I kept thinking, "Why would we do that?

"We love the goats."

I met a woman at a place called Chestnut Ridge in Center Cambridge and started a relationship with Amy LeBaron, as her student, on the back of a horse.

And then, eventually, she brought me to the racetrack, where I started to photograph the backside of the Saratoga Racetrack.

I started as a hot walker so I could learn about the labor of the racetrack and have a sense of what happened on the backside of the racetrack.

It's not very often in your life that you get to meet somebody as fabulous as Maurice Sendak.

And it's not very often in your life that you actually get to create something with him and his caretaker, best friend, kind-of daughter, Lynn Caponera.

And that's exactly what we did in 2009, was to came together and figured out how Maurice would be able to mentor young illustrators in the same way he was mentored by Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss in their little house in Connecticut.

And so we set upon ourselves to do that.

And in 2010, in the fall of 2010, the Sendak Fellowship started with four artists.

I started to write these stories, you know, from my joyous youth in Lake Ronkonkoma.

And then, as this project of the... photographic archive continued, I decided that it would be interesting to maybe put the stories with the photographs.

My camera is a black box.

As a photographer at Performance Space 122 in New York City, I worked in a black box.

A black box is a place that holds secrets.

The black box in an airplane is what they look at, or listen to, or try and find when a plane goes down.

A portfolio box is a black box.

So, my darkroom is a black box with an amber light, so it made sense to me that that's what it should be called.

"The Black Box, the Revealer of the Truths."