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.

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.

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 really love that dynamic between beauty and sadness...theres always these moments of quiet alienation, the sense of disconnect, but also, these moments of possibility.

There's a parallel between me going through these enormous efforts to try to make a moment that means something - and in a way, the figures are doing the same thing. There is that parallel, for sure.

I'm very moved by the fact that people are drawn into the pictures and that they do bring their own history and their own interpretation to the photograph. I think that's why they work in a certain way.

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