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

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

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 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.

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 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 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.