I didn't know the work of Carl Chiarenza or his close relationship with Aaron Siskind. Chiarenza argued that photography, from its first moment, was made to conform to a Renaissance convention for pictorial representation. He says:

For over 165 years, an extraordinary number of forces have made us instinctively believe that photographs are windows on reality — even when reason tells us otherwise. We share photos of our children and we say, "this is my daughter," as if the photograph was not there. Consequently, we tend to fail to consciously recognize that while a photograph is substantially different from other kinds of pictures, it is still a picture, and, therefore is characteristically, and importantly, different from whatever was in front of the lens.

For him, the problem is how to get the viewer to abandon the commonly held belief in the photograph as window; how to get the viewer to go through the window to a new and unique visual event, not to an illusion of one that already occurred.

Chiarenza argued that photographic pictures were more made than taken. A photograph is literally a piece of paper with an array of shapes and tones that may more or less be controlled and manipulated by the person making it, both at the negative and the positive stages of the process. Our sense of landscape, for instance, is that it is a pictorial idea that we construct.

He gave up taking photographs outside of his studio in 1979 when he began photographing collages he assembles in the studio out of assorted materials including metal scraps, foil, bits of paper, lids from tin cans and such. Photo collage has remained his approach to photography.

He works in a studio-controlled environment, using a large format camera, carefully collaging materials together and photographing them using the medium of light to control the surfaces. As a result, his imagery appears as miniature unusual landscapes, which in some instances have been created using materials as simple as foil and strips of paper