Statement

As a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my family lived near Calabasas, California. There was a large Movie Ranch where my friends and I would sneak in and wander through the abandoned sets, and we were often chased by a faceless man in a white pickup truck. Leo Gorcey, one of the “dead-end kids,” lived across the street from us for a while. In the late 1970s, I worked on an extensive project photographing the old New York City backlot at MGM Studios in Culver City.

Around 1991, I had the idea of photographing the sites of miracles. I imagined generic landscapes where something miraculous was said to have happened. In looking into it, there were very few such significant sites in the US in generic landscapes. I ended up, in 1992, making a body of work, “History Sites,” in which important events had taken place, but the sites were unremarkable. This included such sites as Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond, Gettysburg, and the Little Bighorn battlefields.

Years later, around 2001, I ran into Korey Kaplan, a graduate student with whom I had worked while teaching at CalArts. I asked her what she had been up to, and she said that she was the Production Designer on The X-Files. I told her about my “miracle” idea and that I thought the X-Files somehow fit into that perspective. She set me up to meet with Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files. He permitted me to photograph on the sound stages on days when they were not shooting. I got a badge that got me through the Fox Studios gate, and I could go there anytime I wanted. This was the X-Files last season.

I had never photographed on a soundstage before, and I found it fascinating. Since I was not shooting on production days, most of the lighting was either from skylights or work lights. There were often many individual sets at various stages of construction or destruction. One day, I came upon what appeared to be a group of modest modernist interiors. They were interesting, so I made a set of images. I only later found out these were the interiors from the television series “The Brady Bunch” that had been reassembled for an episode of The X-Files. It was an episode in which someone had the delusion that they lived in the Brady Bunch house. I had not watched that series when it was aired and had not recognized the sets.

Most of us harbor an existential anxiety born of the predictability and probabilities of observable reality. The observation that tomorrow will most likely be like today, and that we will be one day closer to the undeniable destination of death. It is an anxiety that drives us toward nature, to get drunk, have sex, climb mountains, or that predisposes us to believe in miracles and space aliens. I was interested in The X-Files because it is literally a stage for expressing a range of existential disorientation and desires. I hope that there is some resonance between the generic nature of these sets, the character of photographic insistence on the observable present, and the X-Files as cultural fact.

I wish to especially thank Corey Kaplan, the Production Designer for The X-Files for making access to these sets possible as well as aid and encouragement. I also want to thank Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, for permitting me to complete this project.