I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.'

The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.