Syntax of the Copy, 1977
Gelatin Silver print, hand tinted, 20" x 24"



"Syntax of the Copy" is a project coming out of the tradition of the "still life". It consists of sequences and variations of a set of objects and their fascimile copies juxtaposed against each other.

In 1977 I worked in a commercial photography studio and was daily exposed to the staging and construction of newspaper ads of merchandise photographed for the daily promotions of products for the consumer market. Every morning, blueprintsarrived illustrating how the photograph needed to be taken with accompanying copy. Models showed up and by late afternoon, the finished prints would be sent off to the newspaper printers. Exposed to the artifice of studio visualization, I became interested in the staging process and the question of the relationship between the copy and the real. I stayed after-hours at which time I would collect objects at the local construction site and brought them back to the studio to be copied on a stat machine and then photographed the two in the "still life" tradition using a large format studio camera.

At this time, the focus of the photographic discourse centered on examining the relationship of the real to the copy, and also the notion of the photograph as the result of a process of a set of actions and events over time. Roland Barthes' influence was felt in terms of his analysis of the multiple layers of codification in the photographic image as expounded in his "Rhetoric of the Image". "Syntax of the Copy" can be thought of as a consequence of the intersection of commercial studio practice, its theoretical analysis, and the poetics of the fine arts image.