Fireflies / The shifting emphasis away from formal modernist concerns was a difficult one for me, having studied with both Aaron Siskind and Wynn Bullock, both masters of modernist practice. However, my tendency was to embrace photography as a tool of production rather than as an instrument of expression, and to explore the means by which the image was produced and conveyed. Initially, the electronically encoded wire photo and subsequent FAX technology, introduced in the late 1960s, seemed to me to signal a radical transformation of the materiality of the image and its potential for manipulation, integration, and penetration into an emerging electronic elsewhere. The undifferentiated digital coding of photographs, sound, music, and text together offered a new language of synthesis, providing a common electronic platform for unifying basically incompatible signifiers. This interested me and shifted my picture-making from an essentially subtractive process of observation to an additive process of visualization.