Magic Hour

It seems to me like the more dramatic the subject matter a photographer takes on, the more difficult their job becomes. When what is in front of the camera has so much visual appeal already, how do you make pictures that are more interesting than the event?

Jeff Burton’s pictures are such a great example of how brilliantly someone has dealt with that problem. His work, much of which was made on gay adult film sets in LA, rarely just documents what is in front of him, but rather uses that material to construct his own personal and mysterious world that's more suggestive than explicit.

Burton was born in Anaheim, California and grew up in Texas where he studied at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. He then pursued his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts as a painter before moving back to LA where he got a job at Catalina Films shooting stills on on gay porn sets.

We had this conversation in the garden outside his home in Silver Lake in Los Angeles.