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

My pictures are about a search for a moment—a perfect moment. To me the most powerful moment in the whole process is when everything comes together and there is that perfect, beautiful, still moment. And for that instant, my life makes sense.

You have this ambition to make something perfect, exactly right. Of course, necessarily, it fails in some way and you have to accept that for what it is, and then you're on to the next thing.

For all the talk of my pictures being narratives or that they're about storytelling, there's really very little actually happening in the pictures. One of the few things I always tell people in my pictures is that I want less - give me something less.

Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don't want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that's why I really try not to pump up motivation or plot or anything like that.

Usually I'll drive to certain locations over and over again, over a course of months really. And then it might just be I hit it at the right time, and the right light. And then I might go to that location over and over again, and then what happens in that lag time where - the image sort of locks in - all of a sudden I see it in my mind's eye.

In "Twilight," the narratives are more literal, and the event is much more spectacular. The pictures in "Beneath the Roses" are much more psychological and grounded in reality.