Vik Muniz
[Artist, b. 1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil, lives in New York.]

 Perhaps the first photograph ever taken, Niépce’s view of the rooftops over Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, was a truly pure photograph. The second one he took, he was already comparing nature to the first photograph he had taken. 

Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 The suburban West is, from a moral perspective, depressing evidence that we have misused our freedom. There is, however, another aspect to the landscape, an unexpected glory. Over the cheap tracts and littered arroyos one sometimes sees a light as clean as that recorded by O'Sullivan. Since it owes nothing to our care, it is an assurance; beauty is final. 

Sophie Ristelhueber
[Photographer, b. 1949, Paris, lives in Paris.]

 My real interest is traveling the world’s tormented places and revealing the scars and the traces on the ground. I am dedicated to the earth. 

Dennis Oppenheim
[Artist, b. 1938, Electric City, Washington, d. 2011, New York.]

 You can’t understand how strange it was to be a sculptor who exhibited photographs. (On exhibitions of his “earthworks” and land art pieces.) 

Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 Nature photography… that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear—it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves. 

David Maisel
[Photographer, b. 1961, New York, lives in San Francisco.]

 My sense is that the places I photograph are an outer manifestation of our own psyches. These are not simply the work of some corporate enemy, but rather a reflection of who and what we are collectively, as a society. 

Mark Klett
[Photographer, b. 1952, Albany, New York, lives in Tempe, Arizona.]

 So much of what we know, and what we think we know, about the land has first passed through someone's lens. The interesting thing is to make use of this history, not merely to be absorbed into it. For me, landscape photographs begin as the artifacts of personal moments. They get interesting when they become cultural commentary. 

Jonathan Green
[Writer, photographer, and curator, b. 1939, lives in Riverside, California.]

 The desire to spiritualize the American earth is deeply rooted in a Puritan and romantic attempt to find in the new American landscape the religious sources that had been left behind in the old world. The burden this has placed on Americans who have photographed the natural world has been overwhelming. 
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