R. Crumb
[Cartoonist, b. 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lives in Sauve, France.]
They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes.(On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had “Stanley Something-or-other” take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”)
I couldn’t find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento — Stanley Something-or-other — to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots. I use photos a lot for drawing people and personalities, but they’re almost never photos that I’ve taken.