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 love idyllic places and the kind of suspension of history they offer. But noble beauty is not enough. One must complicate the picture, because there's nowhere to "escape" to on the planet in pursuit of a hermetic pastoralism or a redemptive wilderness sublime.

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.

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

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

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

I was flying planes before I was driving cars. I started gliding when I was fourteen, about when I started photographing. I was a geeky kid, and the camera was a way in high school for me to have some power. Flying was, too, I guess.