Beauty is a-- is an antique word, and much
in the disrepute among many but I think it's central
Beauty to me is a word for wholeness
So as a photographer, what I'm after usually is
a picture where all the pieces fit together
into a unified, balanced, coherent whole
The American West has been my primary subject,
particularly the landscape
When I was in high school my family moved to Colorado
And at first I didn't like it, to be honest It seemed
like the seasons were all funny
and didn't change the right way
But after a little bit of work in the mountains I came
to love it passionately
And then when I went away to school
in California I-I encountered a landscape that seemed
to be coming apart, basically It was not respected
and it had been damaged
I thought, "This must be the worst place
in the whole world
And slowly I came to love it too
It was very different, but it had a remarkable verdancy
to it, despite all the human mistakes that
were everywhere apparent, and despite the bad air
And then I went back to Colorado
on vacations where my family lived,
and it seemed like the California condition was rapidly
moving eastward, and it just hurt terribly
When I began to--
to photograph, I-I my first efforts were very much
in the mode of Ansel Adams
They were attempts to go and sort out all the roads
and all the bad air and-- and the suburban housing,
and just take pictures of mountains and rivers
But a very odd thing happened I went out
and I took pictures of-- of interstates and new housing,
which was growing all along the edge of the mountains
in Colorado, and I began to get pictures I didn't really
understand
There-- there was the bad stuff,
but every once in a while,
there was still a kind of luminous
radiance over this landscape of mistakes, really
And I began to see this was a very complicated issue,
and that got really interesting
You could take pictures of suburban tract homes, which
are in many ways inhumane, but they were showered with
high-altitude sunlight that transformed them in-- in--
in ways that I can't put into words
But it sort of saved them in a way
In 1978, I went back to Los Angeles, California
because it was--
it was so wonderful in an unexpected way
This is a picture from the top of Signal Hill above Long
Beach
This is one of the times when things worked pretty
much by accident
If you ask me, "What does the picture mean?"
I can't tell you I--
I'm fond of-- of a--
of a remark that Robert Frost made when he was asked
what a p a particular poem meant
And he thought for a minute,
and he said, "You want me to say it worse?
So all I can say is that it's a picture that does
capture both the resilience of nature and the isolation
of nature often in-- in Los Angeles It's--
it's got the full burden of mystery and damage
A photographer has several things to work with time,
point of view
But above all, a photographer has the edges of the frame
And what you do is try to look at the world in a way,
through the finder, so that all the pieces cohere
In most cases where I'm photographing,
wholeness in the picture is a metaphor for wholeness
in life
If something is hanging out
the picture in an unbalanced way,
it says something that's ominous
But if you can pull it all together,
it usually says something better