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.
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.
I like to think of Photography 1.0 as the invention of photography. Photography 2.0 is digital technology and the move from film and paper to everything on a chip. Photography 3.0 is the use of the camera, space, and color and to capture an object in the third dimension.
I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out.
We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. We are working to supply the kinds of materials that are necessary for the lives we've built for ourselves.
Good governance takes behavior that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it's polluting behaviour, plastics, or whatever, and taxes the behaviour.
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.
I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.
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.
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.
Berlin has a uniquely haunting nature, symbolic of a problematic system that was created to oppress and divide a nation.
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.
Somebody referred to what I do as subliminal activism, which I like.
My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.
I remember the first roll of film I took. It was wintertime, and I wanted to shoot a roll of film to practice processing it, so I took an entire 36-exposure roll of my dog, Tippy.
