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.

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.

The pilot says, "Where do you want to go?" and that's always a rather existential question, because naturally I think a bit about where I want to go, but of course I can't really know where I want to go, in advance. I know it when I see it.

I'm attracted to the garden, without a doubt, but I always try and image the wolf that's there, too. And that wolf would be us. It's not that we're malevolent or evil - we're marvelous, fantastic, tool-bearing beings and capable of so much - but there are so many of us, and we don't tend to take responsibility for what we do.

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.

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.

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?