SFBG: Your work from the earlier 2005 era reminds me a bit of a short film by an artist named Olivo Barbieri. I can't remember the title, but it has these amazing colorful aerial views of Las Vegas in which the city really looks like it is comprised of toy buildings and cars. Were you looking for that kind of 'making strange' effect when presenting views some might take care for granted?
SM: The work I was making from 1999 until around 2002 tried to take things that were fake and make them look real. When I first started re-photographing the collages I was making (in 2003), the miniaturization effect was an unexpected but welcome result. I was working in the other direction, making the real look fake. The collages are made by hand, so the edges are rough and messy. The selective blurring of images was there at first to hide where the images were put together, but it was that transformative quality of the focus that made the process intriguing to me. With the collaged images, I was taking pictures from all over, real images of real things, and by bringing those disparate elements together, the pictures raise questions about what was actually in the photograph.
The image of the park (in the Guardian's Photo Issue), for example, has the playground from Dolores Park, but with the downtown skyline and bridge removed and replaced with a sky from another city. It may be the absence of the urban center normally in the background that makes the picture seem odd, or it could be that the light from the sky is not the same reflecting off the foreground. The relationship between fact and fiction is one of the strongest reasons I work with photography as opposed to other visual art forms.

Plane and Land, by Sean McFarland

Tracks, by Sean McFarland

SFBG: You mention collage as a part of your process. That might not be so apparent to someone who casually glances at your photography. Can you tell me a bit about your approach to collage, and also if there are any collage artists who you especially like?
SM: Lately I've been working to make the collage process less apparent. In the past, the images took the final form of a C-Print, made in a darkroom. Now I'm using Polaroid film. Polaroids are mementos and souvenirs of moments, places, and things that actually happened; they imply that whatever is in the picture was witnessed, was real. Since I can't really take the images I'm making, I'm using collage to do so. A good example is the image of the airplane flying over the black ocean and white land. The picture of the plane is taken from a satellite image of earth, the land is a photograph I made in the Exploratorium (it's a picture of an exhibit that shows how land is changed by wind currents).

Sunset, by Sean McFarland

SFBG: Books are a big visual inspiration to me, so I liked seeing you cite the Field Guide to North American Weather and Gerhard Richter's Atlas as two recent sources of fascination and perhaps material. What drew you to those books and what do you like about them?
SM: I enjoy those books because they both wonderful collections. I work from an archive of several thousand images. This is probably why Atlas is so fascinating to me. It's the source material (mostly photographs) that Richter uses in his work and it made me even more interested in his work. I like the field guide because all the pictures in it are of weather-based natural phenomena. Some of the photographs in it are pretty hard to believe, but actually happened.