New Project: 30 Peppers

I was getting burned out, more and more distant from photography itself, despite working on photography-related things all week long. When we decided to do a show of my nuclear weapons images at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, in Albuquerque, the original conception was to display maybe 40 images. It ended up being 96. During the planning of the show, my intention was to have a lab print the images (something I rarely do) just because it was so much work. But after talking with printers, I found them willing to do exactly what I wanted, very skillfully, but they were reluctant to print the images how they thought the images should be printed. But if my job then is to Photoshop the images to the point where they are ready to print—that time when you develop the look of the print during printing is where lots of the creative work takes place—and to hand over that finished file to print, why not just print them myself? And so I did that, too. And then, looking at the…