The Paris Review

My process is different every time. Sometimes I stumble upon places, objects or spaces that I then go back and photograph. I also do research and travel to cities in the U.S. that are historically known as industrial, like Bethlehem and Bath in Western Pennsylvania. I’m not actually looking for anything specific; there’s no predetermined idea in my mind. I walk around these industrial sites until I find the shapes and structures that are rich in lines and geometric forms. I often travel to New Jersey, mainly to Elizabeth. It’s a heavily industrial city, a blue-collar working-class city. A friend of mine wanted to come shoot with me one day—he’s from Cleveland, which is where I grew up. He found it hilarious that I moved from Cleveland to New York, because I keep going to places that look like Cleveland.

As a photographer, I’m visually attracted to the same things I found compelling when I thought I’d be an industrial designer. When I started art school, I realized I liked the medium of photography and its immediacy more than drawing. When I take photos of these places that already exist I can then see them through my own perspective, instead of re-creating them through a sketch or a drawing. The photographs featured in the show were taken in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania.

Factory Wall, Elizabeth, New Jersey

Crane 19, New York, New York

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Before Lippincott, Inc. was founded in 1966, artists had no natural industrial partner and no capacity to produce sculpture on an industrial scale. They had to fabricate their own pieces, working alone or perhaps with assistants or students, or turn to manufacturers with no experience producing artworks. Sculpture was typically modest in scale, designed for intimate viewing, and often still produced in the artisanal manner—by the incremental labor of single artists.

After Lippincott, Inc. was founded by my father, Donald Lippincott, and his business partner, Roxanne Everett, sculpture changed. It got bigger, it moved outdoors, it asserted itself as a modern form of public monument. The Lippincott shop introduced industrial production to sculpture and vice versa, and it helped create a new kind of work in which scale was not just a formal matter but a crucial part of the sculptural endeavor. Lippincott’s four decades in business correspond quite neatly with perhaps the most active period of public sculpture in art history; for more than a decade and a half, Lippincott was the only fabricator dedicated exclusively to fine art.

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Black Hawthorn

As a Canadian, the shapes of leaves are part of my subconscious; learning to draw the maple leaf on our flag was like learning to ice skate. I feel a loyalty to Canada. I love how it is somehow still possible to be a speck in a vast landscape—the matter-of-fact feeling that something out there is bigger, greater (which probably contributes to what is taken for national humility and manners). I like that Canadian artists have always grappled with the idea of “north.” I love the mounds of beautiful Precambrian rock that swell up all over southern Ontario.

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Car Bomb, 2008. Photocollage, acrylic, resin on wood panel. 60" x 60". © Fred Tomaselli. Image courtesy of the James Cohan Gallery, New York.

When Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem announced in April that he would be relocating from Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to the white-collar, academic enclave of Claremont, California (where he’d take over David Foster-Wallace’s teaching slot at Pomona College), the borough felt a twinge of old-time, Brooklyn Dodgers–style rejection. Fortunately for dwellers of Kings County—and others who hold resident New York bards dear—Fred Tomaselli was simultaneously putting the finishing touches on the installation of his latest crackerjack show: his unabashedly gorgeous, conceptually expansive midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.

Tomaselli is a Brooklynite in the same way most New Yorkers come by their adoptive heritage—as immigrants from ambition. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Orange County, within spitting distance of Disneyland’s Matterhorn, he moved to Los Angeles in 1981, only to leave for New York, and rusty, desperate Brooklyn, in 1985—“one last crazy stupid thing before I got old and lost my nerve,” he later recalled.

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William Eggleston, 1970. Photographer unknown.

William Eggleston’s color photographs are among the most widely viewed, and widely admired, in the medium. But I wanted to survey Eggleston’s unseen, unpublished work—his B-sides, bootlegs, unreleased tracks—and to that end I made five trips to Memphis in the course of a year, rummaging through roughly 35,000 digital scans archived by the Eggleston Artistic Trust. The intention was to come up with a book of images rescued from near oblivion. The resulting selection—necessarily partial, narrow, subjective—favors pictures of people, many of them the photographer’s blood relatives and close friends, a few of which appear below. When I reviewed an early layout with Bill, he was pleased to be confronted with images he’d clean forgotten about, and he provided considered commentary.

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Katharina Grosse is a German artist based in Berlin. We were captivated by her architectural shapes, and the vivid colors in her paintings. Her process is equally powerful: armed with a spray gun, she covers large canvasses, often close to seven feet heigh, with layers of paint. “I become a different being when I’m spraying,” she said in a recent interview. “I enlarge myself. I’m able to embrace far more than just my bodily presence. I would always start with these very intense yellows and greens and reds because I always assumed that that’s what’s underneath the surface. That’s how I see things. That’s how I see the world. The very strong and raw colors tend to attract or even repulse the viewer. They tend to create certain reactions in a very direct way. To be over-explicit with these raw colors is one of my intentions.” —Thessaly La Force

Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 84 3/4 x 57 3/4 inches

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