"A picture which was already there appears."

Why take these photographs? That question has stayed with me since my first trips to Mexico and the United States. It's a bit like a latent image, a random mix of what's in front of me and what's already in my head, mine or everyone's. Vague things that come together and suddenly feel obvious, as if the scene had happened before. Roadside motels, cactus, warm air, sunburn.

I see it as something built out of a pile of past stuff, some of it lived, some of it not. A book, a movie, a song, a magazine page, bits of a conversation overheard on the subway.

This image is part of the Saltillo Variations series. I take my photos apart and push them toward abstraction, trying to figure out what in the scene made me stop and shoot, until what's left is mostly a sensation.

There's obviously something to understand.