I photograph remote environments reached on foot, often after hours of walking and climbing through altitude, exposure, fatigue and changing weather. The journey is one of the conditions of the work. I am interested in the tension between the demands of making a photograph and the effortlessness with which it can later be seen.

Reaching these places can resemble conquest, yet arriving produces the opposite sensation. The scale and indifference of the landscape diminish rather than affirm the individual. As the social world recedes, familiar measures of time, distance and proportion begin to shift; without buildings, people or other markers of scale, the landscape becomes difficult to measure in human terms. The photographs contain no figures, but the body is implicit in every image. I had to stand in that particular place. The experience is exhilarating and unsettling: the greater the effort required to enter it, the more conscious I am of my presence and my insignificance.

Beauty is central to the work. I want the photographs to be visually generous and seductive: light moving across rock, immense shifts in scale. These landscapes are beautiful and inhospitable at once, inspiring awe and pleasure while remaining utterly indifferent to the person and those feelings.