I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

When I go up, especially if I'm paying for a small helicopter and pilot, I'm on. I've got an hour and a half and the clock is ticking and it's costly and I enter into a super-heightened state of mind.

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context.

I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.

We have not only the right, but a specific duty, to honestly and unflinchingly look at all aspects of our world, both the one we create as humans and the one we are lucky enough to inhabit as a species.