Clifford Ross: biography

Before my interest unfolded so strongly in the world of photography, I was a painter and sculptor for about twenty years.

At the end of college I was pretty firmly committed to abstract painting, it struck me as the most viable tradition for me at that moment. And more or less, when I graduated from college, I moved pretty quickly into a circle that involved Clement Greenberg and the colorfield painters. Between 84 and 94, when I made the shift to photography, my job was to integrate my new understanding of the real world and depicting it with all the modernist tendencies, which grew out of figures like Goya, in a certain way, but certainly Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, etc.

The journey into photography was as accidental as a lot else in my working life. I was carrying a small camera around in my pocket taking snapshots when I was doing oil studies from nature as fuel for larger scale works. Basically little black and white contact prints from a little 35 mm contact sheets were littered all around my studio. And I was using them as inspiration, and eventually they became a more literal jumping off point for my work And curiously, around 94, I was doing an exhibition of drawings and very large scale paintings, and my then dealer came to the studio to make some selections, and he asked me what these little black and white photographs were, and I said “oh they're nothing which was, I guess, an invitation for him and he started looking at them, he said, "I think it would be interesting to show these, these are the underpinnings of this body of work."

I was quite resistant at first, and then I thought "well, you  know, it's an exploration, we'll frame three tiny little pieces they were one by one and a half inches and some of the paintings I was showing were up to 16 feet."

We ended up actually exhibiting three of these tiny photographs. But things I thought were a throwaway turned out to have as much value as the so-called serious work.