Emmet Gowin, Newly Mown Alfalfa Disturbed by a Storm, on the Snake River Plain Near the Confluence of the Columbia River, Washington, 1991.

"So, I started to travel, began to make what I call 'working landscapes', and in a simple way, I was very attracted to people like Robert Smithson. When I began to travel and look at the landscape, I saw that what I liked about what was being done in galleries worked so much better when it was in the living landscape. Then it wasn’t just a pattern across the gallery floor and a symbolic world, but it had all these forces of nature clawing at it, working it, and the human thing that was being made always had to alter itself and accommodate what nature was doing to it. I just love looking at the natural landscape. And I love the hand of the human being on the landscape. The Earthworks people were really collaborative artists with nature. Symbolically I was for what they were for, but in execution the work looked like baby talk. It was on such an unsubtle scale compared to a four or five hundred year old field that’s been under constant cultivation. That represents something of tremendous subtlety, and is actually more integrated than our eyes are really able to understand. The point for me in photographing the land was to try to introduce and reassociate myself with that subtlety. Often it would be years after taking the picture that I would realize: that’s why I did that. That was not an irrational or an arbitrary move, it’s related to the way things are in action on the landscape. And that’s a pretty important point, that the living landscape is a field of action, not stasis. It’s constantly evolving and adapting. One of the things that was sad for me about art practice was trying to bring the understanding of the natural world into the gallery. I knew that the photo was cut out and separate from the natural process, but it had a proper relationship. It was a time slice out of the natural process. And it had a secondary value, it was a comparative evidence against the changes. A field seen a second time or a third time is not ever the same."

From this mind-blowing interview.