... despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today - one central to the development of cultural dialogue.

One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something.

In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.

The one thing that seems to be consistent through all my work that I like, and I experimented a lot, is the viewer is allowed to meditate on something that normally we don't stop and stare at, whether it's people or a cactus.

People have responded to the pictures I make as mystical things, and they somehow carry the illusion further thinking that the place is this mystical, magical place. The desert is also a very barren place, a very lonely place, a very boring, uneventful place.

... despite the limitations and problems inherent to photographic representation (and especially the representation of politics), it remains for me the most powerful and engaging medium today - one central to the development of cultural dialogue.