I was in the wilderness of Hollywood for almost ten years. I was off the studio lists. I wasn't getting the roles offered to actors that hadn't done a third of the roles I had done or had the popularity I had.
The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty.
The undisturbed coastal plain is home to a wide variety of plants and animals and is the only wilderness sanctuary in North America that protects a complete range of the arctic ecosystem.
You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.
There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'
To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.
My mind became agitated with the enquiry - why a nation, separated from us by an ocean more than three thousand miles in extent, should endeavor to enforce on us plans of subjugation, the most unnatural in themselves, unjust, inhuman in their operations, and unpractised even by the uncivilized savages of the wilderness?
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
Sometimes, when I open my mouth, all hell breaks loose. Other times, I feel like a voice in the wilderness and I wonder, 'Does anybody get this?'
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.
