Max Pam
[Photographer, b. 1949, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Perth, Australia.]
[My photography teacher] gave me the Mexican Day Books of Edward Weston and just blew me away with this work. The fact that you could be this fabulous visual artist, with all this milieu of people like Diego Rivera and you could sleep with these gorgeous, amazing women, that you could live that life—that photography could deliver you that life.
I set a discipline for myself to return every afternoon and take photographs like Edward Weston: f22, full sun, big set squares, big circles. I would smoke a joint with some hippies on the grass, then go do some more pictures.
Photography’s about the surface, what’s happening at the top of the sea. Literature’s about all the stuff below.