That this wilderness is honeycombed with underground tunnels, pockmarked by blue-green piles of tailing, and still shows traces of aerial tramways leading from mines to mills, hardly matters to the backpackers and mountain climbers who visit it today. For them, escapees from an urban world who are willing to pay dearly to travel to the outer reaches of civilisation, this place has become a symbol of romantic decay in the midst of deep wilderness...As [they] scramble about the ruins of the place, admiring the icy sublimity of the mountains and reflecting on the more ambiguous beauty of the mill, [they] would do well to place themselves as one of the figures in the ghost landscape. [They] too are part of its environmental history, bringing with [them] assumptions about nature and humanity that have led [them] to choose this particular place as the object of some desire. The paths out of town have brought [them] on the very road that once created it. The end of the journey is also its beginning: in the wilderness that is culture's creature, the place where nature and history have met and turned, and turned again. (Cronon. W Kennecott Journey 1992) Photography is to seeing what poetry is to writing: a way of thinking, a disciplined practice that produces insight, a condensed telling. Deciding where to point the camera, where to stand, I choose subject and stance. Framing the image, I place the threshold and shape the view, bringing certain features into dialogue, excluding others. I determine what should be sharp, what to blur, what should be highlighted, in shadow. To print a photograph, is to revisit time and place, recall light and mood, refine shades of meaning, and, sometimes, to find in the image things I had not seen. Photographs prompt and push my thinking: I let them speak and sort them as images first, seeking associations, before translating those insights into words. The whole process, from first look to final print, from single image to sequence, tunes my eye and changes how and what I see. If I am fortunate, the world appears new, and I know where to stand. (Spirn, A. W. Knowing Where to Stand [work statement] 2003)