JONATHAN CHERRY: Has there been something significant that has inspired you over the last 14 days?

CHRISTOPHER SIMS: I’ve been far too obsessed with some Neil Young bootleg records from the mid 1970s this week. I think it has something to do with the time of year, the winter Olympics in Canada, and Neil’s spectral appearance on the final broadcast of Conan O’Brien’s show last month.

JC: What was the last photography book you flicked through?

CS: BazanCuba, by Ernesto Bazan. Ernesto came and spoke last week to classes at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where I work. I first saw his work over a decade ago and have seen it in various iterations over the years. To see it all collected together I felt again what an achievement it was, and how impressed I was he was able to keep his project going for so long.

JC: Why did you choose to make a body of work at Guantanamo Bay?

CS: Like many people, I first heard about the prison in Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, though I had always been curious about the U.S. Naval Station there. I didn’t really pursue it as a project for a couple more years, but I wondered about who was making photographs of that place - or even if it was possible to make photographs there. In the end it took about two and a half years of writing letters, and figuring out whom to contact in order to gain access. While waiting to hear back, I thought a lot about the project. There were some images that were coming out of Guantanamo, but they all looked pretty similar. You would see photographs of the prisoners, but you wouldn’t see their faces. You would see fences, and barbed wire, but you didn’t really see the place - I didn’t have a sense of what the place really looked like. I became interested in the idea of making war photographs that didn’t seem like war photographs - images that weren’t about seeing violence, or spectacle, or the things that make people turn away from most war photographs. I began thinking that maybe the thing to do was to try to make a type of war photograph that captured something else. I knew that there was the odd fact that it’s a U.S. military base located on a communist island, but the history of the base got even more fascinating the more I researched. It served as a way station for Haitian refugees in the 1990s. There are Jamaican and Filipino guest workers there now. There’s even a McDonald’s on the base. The question of what the place looked like became more and more intriguing. So, when I went it was not with the intent of excluding photos of the prison, or people, but to photograph beyond that too; to photograph the daily life of what it’s like to be there. I wondered what the life of a spouse of a military officer based there looked like, where a janitor would do his or her work, and where people would go after hours. And I wondered if there were details in those places that would somehow reveal something about ourselves, or about the war. Conceptually, I also came to think of the work as an archive; I was filling in the gaps of an archive that didn’t yet exist.

JC: What do you feel you learnt from your experience there?

CS: I was really struck by the landscape and the structures in Guantanamo Bay.It’s more ramshackle and improvised than you might think. It feels very isolated, and it also feels a little like you’re on a frontier. It feels like people are kind of improvising, and making do with the resources that they have. I had just assumed the whole place would be relatively state-of-the-art. A large part of Camp Delta is trailers. I think that’s not an image that comes to people’s minds when they think of the detention center there. Also, it can feel kind of lonely, even for a visitor such as myself. I think the base is about 45 square miles, but there are just a few pockets where people are.

JC: Was it hard to get access to photograph for ‘Theater of War’?

CS: I would say that it was hard in the sense that it requires a lot of patience while my requests to photograph on military bases went through the many layers of approval that are required. In an odd twist, many of the offices I was communicating with seemingly didn’t have answering machines, so I’d often have a long list of phone numbers that might have worked sometime in the past, and I’d just start down the list hoping to reach someone who knew on what desk my request might be.

But I would say the flip side to this is that, in time, you’d get a straightforward answer about whether or not you had received permission. And when the permission was granted, the public affairs offices were generally very helpful in setting up the arrangements - more than I think the average person might expect they’d be.

JC: What equipment do you use?

CS: I chiefly use a Hasselblad 503cw nowadays.

In Guantanamo Bay I used a Canon SLR digital camera - among the rules established there for photographers is that you have to use a digital camera, as they have censors who review your photographs before you leave the base. There weren’t such restrictions for Theater of War.

JC: What are your photographic plans for 2010?

CS: This spring I’m concentrating on preparing for a couple of exhibits forTheater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan - at SF Camerawork, FotoFest in Houston, and at the SRO Gallery at Texas Tech in Lubbock. I also have a large stack of negatives to go through, which is a priority. Lastly, I’m looking forward to making new photographs over the summer, but I’m not sure exactly what direction I’ll be going in quite yet.