EXCERPT

Crimmins: You started your career as a sculptor. How did you move into photography?

Garwood: I was drawn to sculpture because it’s multi-dimensional and deals with the environment the way we encounter it. It’s in the world. In the 1970s, when I was studying, sculptors were working with movement, installation and performance, and it offered a more expanded concept of artmaking to me than painting did at that time. My early work was installation-oriented.

The sculptors I admired in the 60s and 70s were using photography as an extension of their practice. Robert Smithson was wandering around New Jersey and photographing. His photographic work was an early reference for me, and also the photographic work of Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark.

So you were inspired by sculptor’s photographs in particular?

Yes. There was a sense of continuum between their sculpture and their photography. Their photographs used multi-format shots that were relational. They presented images in grids and matrixes, and thought of the ensemble as “documentary”—as opposed to the “painterly” aesthetic of single photographs. Strangely, no one discussed Gordon Matta-Clark’s photographs as photographs until very recently. Sometime in the late 1990s the Guggenheim finally created the category of “conceptual photography” for work of this type. Now it fits in beautifully with other efforts to multiply and deconstruct the camera’s image.