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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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