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.

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

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.

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

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.

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.