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.

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.

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

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.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

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.

I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in the mechanics of what makes this country happen, the power structures, the natural splendor.