Joseph Bartscherer
- Date of Birth: August 30, 1954

- Location: New York, New York.

- Profession:  Artist

- What are you most excited about right now?  Forest. Upcoming show at Galerie Nelson in Paris.

- Who or what has influenced you the most?  Childhood family life. Catholic Mythology.  Physical labor.  High School, especially a class on the English Romantic poets. Sunday visits on my own to the Metropolitan Museum, especially Renaissance Art.  Harvard College, especially courses with Richard Niebuhr (philosophy) Michael Fried (history of post-war art) and Ben Lifson (photography).  The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the climate of argument prevailing there in the late 70’s.  Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol. Giotto’s Arena Chapel.  Hopkins, Yeats, Frost. Robert Frank’s The Americans,  Walker Evan’s, American Photographs.  Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  Carleton Watkins.  Timothy O’Sullivan.  John Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye. Eugene Atget. Garry Winogrand. Elizabeth Bishop. John Milton.
  
- What is your biggest road block when it comes to working?  Budget and context.  Its easiest to work with money at hand and the prospect of an exhibition or publication on the horizon.

- What do you hope to do in the future?  Prosper, root and stem.

- Does your work fufill you? No.

- What antagonizes you the most? Small impediments.

- What is your working space like? Light. Organized.

- What makes you do what you do? Desire to have a say-so.

- Explain a formative moment or idea for you.  Moving from New York to Seattle in 1980 I was struck how fresh, how recently made, how new, everything was: roads, buildings, fields, farms. You could see (and therefore maybe photograph) in things the bud of the idea, the desire that led to their making.   [Close Interview]