I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire

I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there's always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense... This is what drives you to the next picture.

What the artist attempts to do is to try and tell a story. Attempting to give physical expression to a story that's internal.

All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.

I was never conscious of filming except for when I was location scouting. In a way, that is the most important part of the entire process - and the most private. I'm so used to doing that alone. Unlike every other part, it's just me, alone, on location.It's very hard to describe what I'm looking for - something that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It's not enough for it just to be strange or mysterious, it also has to feel very ordinary, very familiar, and very nondescript.

The whole reason I make these pictures is for those moments of clarity. For that single moment, everything seems to make sense in my world. And I think we all look for that in our lives, because our lives are generally filled with chaos and confusion and disorder and complication.

I think maybe the figures - that's a good word - the figures in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection.