PS: We grew up on a hill, and there was nothing but orange grove. At the base of the hill was a Buddhist temple and peacocks, and you could hear peacocks in the evenings. And there was nothing around. Now it's all just subdivisions. My dad still lives there, and had a bunch of historic orange groves that he has back there.

JP: Peacocks are generally a useful metaphor.

PS: They're so ostentatious. And the bigger the tail, the harder it is to fly. So crocodiles catch them. It's a beautiful thing that makes you vulnerable. Ok: No more peacocks.

JP: Do you keep notes, or a journal?

PS: I have tons of notes, all over the place. I have a Moleskine that I write in every day. But as far as a journal, not officially.

JP: I always think interesting people who make art tend to have a drawing practice, which for photographers is usually note-taking.

JP: Is most of your work so far portrait-based?

PS: Yes. It's all based on the idea of the portrait, or where the portrait fails.

JP: I knew your work first from the chapbooks that are at Printed Matter. Your Shoot series, where you take multiple portraits of the same person. I like seeing more than one image of the same person. One always seems too finite for me. In my day you could only see contact sheets if it were a Cecil Beaton, and the pictures were of Greta Garbo, and the whole world wanted to see every image of Greta Garbo. If you're Cecil Beaton someone will publish your contact sheet. I like the idea of a contemporary photographer giving you five pictures. I tend to do that myself. Larry Clark does things like that, saying "here, this is a whole roll of film."

PS: I did those because I'd taken so many photographs. I was in the darkroom one day and I had thirty prints, and I wanted a way to talk about narrative.

JP: Do you ever use models, or people who aren't a part of your biography?

PS: No. I think that when you're making a portrait of someone it involves you. You can take pictures of models, or pictures of pretty boys, and it's just about you looking at something. It wasn't until I was comfortable with myself that I started to make pictures of people who are really close to me.

JP: Your light is really interesting. I often can't tell if it's natural or artificial.

PS: Initially I wanted it to be as flat as possible because I didn't want there to be any environmental context. It was just a serial portrait survey. Later I brought in a little more environment, indicating that the pictures were taken in my home, and in my room. The pictures changed because the atmosphere brought a lot of the content to it-even though I didn't want it to be environment portraits.

JP: The light is so clean and daylight-y. You take really beautiful portraits that are really hard to pinpoint. I know because I've taken a stab at imitating them.

PS: [LAUGHS] Natural light is just so much harder to work with. I can never print with natural light. I try to get rid of everything that's superfluous.

JP: I do associate you with white. Even this exhibition, which isn't just photographs lit a certain way, the pages are white-ish, faded to yellow but nonetheless. And the gallery light seemed extra thought-out.

PS: For a lot of people working with photography, it's all about the light: It's the shadows, it's everything. Hopefully for me the light is a lot of nothing. You focus on the person, because if the light is adding content in itself-if it's dramatic lighting- if it constructs how you read a portrait of someone.

JP: The photographs aren't lit all the same exactly. It's not the case of the Avedon portraits in the Southwest, where all the images have the same tonality. You allow for subtle variation even within the series with the same person. Do you care if the pictures are sexy?

PS: With the exception of a few of them, there's nothing happening in them. The portraits of Darren or Nico are the only ones that suggest something might be afoot. I think all the people I photograph are very attractive, but they're not made to titillate. The reason I started doing the portraits is that there were instances, with old friends or people I dated, where something had shifted in the relationship. I hoped to capture that change. If physical attraction is involved in all relationships, I just put it in the front. But it's not the subject.

JP: Do you know the French photographer, [Louis Jean-Baptiste] Igout? He's kind of like the French Muybridge. He did single frames with every kind of gesture. Man, woman and child. They were made as a catalogue of gestures for artists to work from.

PS: There's one thing going on and it's repeated. There's a directness and it's also just a look. But maybe it's the personal connection that makes them a little sexy.

JP: How would you make a picture if you were blind?

PS: I wouldn't make pictures.

JP: Would you stop being an artist?

PS: No. But I make photographs because that works best right now. The medium is just that, and isn't the beginning or end. It's a way through.

JP: You're not supposed to touch paintings.

PS: Only once they go in museums.

JP: ... Especially then! Do you think that lack of tactility is part of what makes photography potentially disappointing as an object?

PS: I like to make photographs of an object or something that can exist in space, which is why I rarely hang things on the walls. I respond to shelve and mantle pieces. It enters a more lived in space. Things accumulate with it.
 
JP: Are you saying you document an experience as opposed to a person?

PS: Yes. I did one commission a portrait of a couple. It is a photograph, but the instructions that come with it dictate that it can't be put on a wall; it must be on a shelf or a mantle. Part of that is because there is the suggestion that like the dynamic of their relationship, the work is fluid and changing.

JP: It seems like AA [Bronson] is the godfather of a certain gang that you're a part of. How did that come about?

PS: Fairy Godfather? I met him through making zines. A friend of mine worked at Printed Matter, so I approached AA for some advice and about Printed Matter. AA is really encouraging and open to sharing with a lot of younger artists. Printed Matter kept a portfolio of my stuff and sold my prints before anyplace else.

JP: I love that since AA's gotten there it's gotten so...

PS: I was at Nom de Guerre, a clothing store with a skater ethic, and there was a row of books. They were all very straight, Nobuyoshi Araki. I wonder what it's like for guys to walk into a store and get two tables of hard-core Homocore.

JP: Are you sensitive to a difference between yourself and other artists working with similar biographical themes, but maybe in a heterosexual context? 

PS: There's so many artists making work about relationships, and with the camera. A lot of it has to do with the overlaps of friendships and romance. I wonder why I don't see more of it in the dynamic of a man and a woman. There are many different reasons to be attracted to someone, and this doesn't happen in a straight binary situation.

JP: When I came to New York there were East Village gays and there were West Village gays. The East Village gays hated the West Village gays.

PS: Today there's Chelsea gays; there's East Village gays; there's West Village gays, there's Downtown gays; there's gays who live on the Upper East Side.

JP: Downtown as opposed to East Village?

PS: Downtown meaning Lower East Side and Chinatown.

JP: They're different? Are there defined characteristics?

PS: Yes. I'm not so sure how exactly to differentiate, except that people run in packs. Everyone I know lives where they do because they can't afford to live in Manhattan, or don't want to live in closets. I thought paying sixteen hundred bucks for a tiny room in the East Village was pretentious. Some people just have to live in Manhattan. I say get a bike.

JP: And your neighborhood?

PS: Me and my friends call each other the Gay Powers. When I moved there was Gay Power bloc, which was Zoe Leonard and Nicole Eisenman. They were all on at street. All the girls had their thing and all the guys moved in. I think we all came together. I have a lot of friends in a six block radius. You can track us on Facebook.

Envoy Gallery is located at 131 Chrystie Street, New York.