We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

I've been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I'd known that before, I don't know if I had the courage to do it again. You get to a point where you feel that you have something that is your own. And if you don't find an audience for it, you are going to burst.

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.

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.

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.