Robin Maddock
Sunday, 27 May 2012
Work from LA Pong.
“…When I got in touch with Maddock recently, I found out that he had spent two months earlier this year in California. “I don’t want to be that dark, gray, gothic English guy all my life,” he told me. “I need a bit of optimism and sunny California stuff.” He also felt the need to try something different photographically. He put down the digital camera he had been using, picked up a 35-millimeter film camera, bought some black-and-white film, rented a darkroom and set about creating scenes to photograph as opposed to reacting to things or events as he had been doing in his documentary work. He threw a Ping-Pong ball throughout Los Angeles and spilled milk around San Francisco, taking pictures as he went. “I wanted this to be less sociological,” Maddock said.
One thing he discovered from the two resulting projects, “L.A. Pong” and “S.F. Milk,” was the value of a short-term perspective: “I always think about Paul Fusco’s R.F.K. Funeral Train — this idea that you can do a project in a day and that’s his greatest project he’ll ever do,” he said. “I’m not saying I could do anything as worthy as that, but it’s different, and what I do like is this simplicity and doing something quite quickly and quite succinctly.” – Stacey Baker for the New York Times.