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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.

Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.