I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.

Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, and trying to use them in some way so that some meaning can be constructed out of them. That's really where the work of the artist begins.

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.

I was living in Monterey, a place where the classic photographers - the Westons, Wynn Bullock and Ansel Adams - came for a privileged view of nature. But my daily life very rarely took me to Point Lobos or Yosemite; it took me to shopping centers, and gas stations and all the other unhealthy growth that flourished beside the highway. It was a landscape that no one else had much interest in looking at. Other than me.

I used photography to distance myself from a world that I loathed and was powerless to improve.

The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film.

I wanted [my photography] to appear as though the camera was seeing by itself.