Photographer

Humans can really reveal themselves through what they choose to see as the most important or meaningful detail in an image.

Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.

All of my work comes out of a deep concern for human expansion into the landscape.

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

If you look at photojournalism, it's largely driven by current events... always chasing a crisis or disaster. I follow a narrative that is much looser than current events.

I wish we could launch a ground-breaking competition that motivates kids to invent new ideas in sustainable living.

When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don't know how to make an interesting picture of that.

I have a fondness for when the landscape becomes surreal.

I no longer see my world as delineated by countries with borders or language, but as seven billion humans living off a single, finite planet.

I wish I could create an IMAX film that would make my work accessible to a broader audience.

As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.

I have always been interested in following the technology that I feel are presenting themselves as true industry and innovation.

I had to work to put myself through school, so I always worked in the heaviest industries I could find because that's who paid the best.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

Digital photography and Photoshop have made it very easy for people to take pictures. It's a medium that allows a lot of mediocre stuff to get through.

In our ephemeral information age, people think we've left behind the stone, bronze, and iron ages. But they're all still going on - we use tonnes of this stuff every day. You just have to look.

Berlin has a uniquely haunting nature, symbolic of a problematic system that was created to oppress and divide a nation.

I'm trying to photograph an old offshore oil city that is lying in decay in the Caspian Sea, but I've been having a hard time getting there.

The bigger question is how does a rogue species called humans - whose population just blew through the seven billion mark on it's way to nine billion members - manage to survive the next century on a planet with finite resources, without destroying its delicate balance in the process.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.