Ari Marcopoulos

I live in the countryside in Northern California. Before that I lived in New York City and never dreamed I would be photographing landscapes. Spending more time in the woods and the mountains, I started to see images. Often my images contain a de-familiarizing element that leads your eye away from the central subject to some different experiential domain, like the skull-shaped hole in Creekside, Sonoma (2004).

In the photo here, I went ten minutes out of New York City by car to find this amazingly raw and beautiful spot and pulled over to try and get an image. It is always hard to say if I got something. Often it takes months to process in my mind what it is. I still often feel lost, even though I have a stronger sense than ever of what I am after. I always want to be on the edge, meaning I want to go beyond what I'm capable of, in a way—to feel that I'm on slippery ice, just recording without much reflection.