George Eastman Museum

During his early years, Carl Chiarenza started moving closer and closer to his subjects, resulting in photographs that looked more and more abstract. Here he is discussing that transition with LensWork magazine editor Brooks Jensen in 2000: Well, when I started making serious photographs, after I got through with the photojournalism stuff and got back on some kind of track, I was really trying to work in the tradition of Minor [White] and Edward [Weston] and Ansel [Adams]. And I used to go out daily with Paul Caponigro—we lived together for a while—and we would go out to various parts of New England and photograph. He would always come back with wonderful landscape pictures and I would always come back with mosquito bites… and halfway decent pictures. But, you know, it took a long time for me to understand that that was not where I was going to be able to function, in terms of expressing what I needed to express. Because I didn't know any other way, there was no other way open to me but that tradition I inhe