Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life.

It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works.

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this, too, belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful.