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

I don't particularly care about photographic authorship. Whether an astronaut who doesn't even have a viewfinder makes an image, a robotic camera, a military photographer, or Mike Light really doesn't matter. What matters is the context of the final photograph and the meaning it generates within that context.

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 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.

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 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 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.

... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

I am a photographer who likes to make images, but I also want to get a sense and understanding of images that have already been made. I don't fabricate worlds I pay attention to the things that already surround us.

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.

Even in this age of digital manipulation, photographs continue to hold a huge degree of power and meaning. They're beautiful and sad and complicated because every stoppage of time refers to the motion of time.