Please tell us about “The Heroine Addict” magazine and its name. I understand it is Lou Reed related? What were your photos about back then?

I discovered The Velvet Underground’s records while I was living in a small town in North Carolina and was extremely impressed by these ultra-cool New Yorkers.  I was studying art in a school there and New York seemed to be a mythical place where all kinds of crazy stuff was happening. The song “Heroin” described what seemed to be the ultimate existential experience – giving your soul over to a pleasure inducing substance. Heroin was non-existent in North Carolina at the time so The Heroin Addict was for people that had a junkie attitude but had no access to it or afraid to do it. The zine was a music zine for one issue then switched to fiction, photos, drawings etc for the other 5 issues. The official title was “The Heroin Addict – the magazine with a consistent attitude.” I still hadn’t done heroin at this point but got briefly addicted to Valium when I moved to New York so I changed the title to “The Valium Addict”. After a while it I changed the title to “Dumb Fucker”. In the South, a Dumb Fucker is someone who thinks he knows everything. I think there were maybe 14 issues of these mags total plus 4 stand-alone titles. I published everything that was sent or given to me so over time the mags got pretty thick. To save space in the later issues, I started shrinking the text on all the writing so it was almost impossible to read them. These mags were free – I printed maybe 500 – 1000 of each (my buddy had free midnight access to a Xerox M95 machine) and dropped them off at random places in Manhattan and sent them to people in other cities and told them to drop them off someplace like a record store or book store.

Do you still mostly work on Super 8 film? If you would film experimental films nowadays, what would they be about?

It was a good medium in the past because you could shoot 2.5 minutes of film with processing for 5$. There was also a place in Manhattan that would process the film for you in 3 hours. S8 was used mainly for sports teams and news stations that needed to look at what they shot quickly. Now of course I use video because you can shoot all you want for nothing. I am still making films but I’m not sure if they are ‘experimental’.  Medicated (which is on my website) is to me, the best of my recent projects. I shoot some video (or film in the old days) on every shoot I do. I always have a specific project in mind but I don’t know which things will exist in some finished form before I die.