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.

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.

Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They're beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.

Once one crosses a conceptual threshold of rethinking what nature might or might not be, it can multiply outward radically. The world becomes a more interesting place to be, and one is perhaps somewhat less judgmental.

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

The representational-image urge is actually a kind of heightened perception, and I don't stop to think. I don't freeze up - it's actually a kind of letting-go. It's like dancing. At a certain point it's conscious, unconscious, everything is kind of coming together.

I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.