My goal was a unique photographic realism: Let the world be represented by photographs already made. I made small, temporary "sculptures" from other photographs…like a collage in space…and sometimes included writing or text, and then re-photographed the setup to transform the space. The result was a traditional photograph. I thought of them as "machines for understanding." At first they often included references to destruction, as I sought to make visible, events, principles, or references that were no longer of my experience in time, but which seemed to stand as visible relics, signs pointing the way from a cultural past which photographic realism preferred not to acknowledge, to wherever it was that I was standing.