The naked figures in the landscape have willingly undressed for my camera. They are either perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else they are gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens.

There's something political about creating a world that you want to exist.

If I stage things too much and nothing changes in the act of photographing, then I might as well have not taken the picture: If the whole thing already exists in my head, then I haven't learned anything. The tension lies between the staging and the unpredictability.

I drove from New York to California by myself. The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs... So actually becoming a runaway was crucial. I had this idea that I'd make my way across the frontier and find my story as it was actually happening in the landscape.

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home.

The naked figures in the landscape have willingly undressed for my camera. They are either perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else they are gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens.

We were really poor when I was growing up; my parents, both artists, were bohemians. Life was a desperate struggle, but in service of a high ideal, which is exactly what my photographs are about.