A piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as 'material' as a ton of lead.

Photographers find themselves directly in competition with mass media's misrepresentations of women. So the photographic terrain is particularly contested from a political point of view.

Despite having been awarded the dubious honor of arthood, all photography is still perceived as having one foot in the real world, a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude, no matter how often it is demonstrated that photographs can and do lie.

Given the lack of public skills in reading photographs, given that photographic content is sometimes buried in beauty, contemporary landscape photographers are often condemned to making pretty pictures. Dramatic clouds and sifting light can overwhelm more mundane information. Yet who can resist beautiful landscape pictures of one kind or another? Not I.

I must admit to a personal lack of sympathy with women who have themselves photographed in black stockings, garter belts and boots, with bare breasts, bananas, and coy, come-hither glances.... A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult.

Men have dominated the field of landscape photography just as they have dominated the land itself. Thus shooting a virgin landscape has been man's work - hunting, not gardening.

There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything.