“A special photo needs a little something extra, something that not just anyone with a phone can stand there and capture. So for me, there has to be an element of privileged access—it can be access to a location or to a subject that makes a moment special enough to actually matter.

An example helps. Imagine you’re at a concert in 2024. Back before smartphones, professional photographers would get access to the front row to capture images of the live performance. But today, anything shot from the audience, whether it’s shot with a nice camera or a phone, delivers that same image. You can draw an analogy to the written word. Anyone, including generative AI, can take existing content and slightly reskin it, but it’s not original work. You have to have unique access and unique perspective to create, not derive.

For this shoot in Yangshuo, China in 2009, I had unique access, and not just to the location, which was actually a popular destination among climbers at the time. I had access to the climber Chris Sharma, who was perhaps the only person capable of climbing at that level in 2009. And it also happened that Sharma’s childhood friend, Shrikanta Barefoot, was in Macau at the time, performing as an acrobat and more for Cirque du Soleil. When he found out that Chris was in China, he joined us to climb with his old friend. The access to location and talent was both engineered—we put ourselves there—and organic—we were friends who climbed.

There was a connection between us. I grew up as an artist’s son with a strange name in conservative Salt Lake City, Utah. Sharma grew up with a strange name in an ashram outside of Santa Cruz, California. Shrikanta grew up in that same ashram. I’m fairly certain that Shrikanta Barefoot is his given name. I’m 16 years older than Chris, but we connected when he was a 15 year old prodigy and remained friends, and I connected with Shrikanta in China for similar reasons. At that time, climbing was part of the counterculture, as I’m sure fire dancing at Cirque du Soleil was to Shrikanta. At a certain level, we were all misfits.

I was on the wall shooting Chris climbing during the golden light of dusk. And just as we were losing the light, I looked down to see Shrikanta in this field running through his dance and tumbling moves in an almost meditative state.

I didn’t know if the subject and the scene would make for some great artwork, but I recognized I had to try. I quickly rappelled off the wall and ran—I was literally running—to my camera bag to swap out for a lens that would help me sculpt the images I wanted to capture. And then I ran into the tall grass to lie down and shoot.

The sun was setting towards the lens. Shrikanta was backlit. There was no direct light on him. But luckily he was wearing light khaki pants and there was just enough ambient light to capture his skin tone. The fading light made the image more dramatic. I didn’t plan that.

I didn’t say anything to Shrikanta. I didn’t want to alter the moment. But Shrikanta was a friend and a performer so he continued.

I don’t think the images were ever published outside of fine art exhibitions. Maybe something ran in a Prana catalog. I seem to remember that those were Prana pants. There was nothing in the magazines. The main image, which I named Leap of Faith, was featured in art installations.

At one installation we blew it up to 10 feet tall and 12 feet wide. It holds up at that scale. It’s just as beautiful large as it is small. It has a painterly quality to it that works as you scale up. If you’re shooting for Instagram the ability to scale doesn’t matter. But if you’re shooting an image that matters you want it to work at the largest scale possible. If you see an image on a large scale that isn’t done correctly, the image essentially breaks. The edges get rough and the subject is pixelated.

The lens I shot with blurs the edges. I wanted that specific look. I wanted to sculpt an image with the lens so that as you scale it up it becomes more dynamic, and that sense increases in intensity as the image gets larger. It becomes more alive and immersive.

In my 50 favorite images collection, this one has a heavy rotation. You can see that it has my brush stroke on it. But it also required this rare access that verges on happenstance but isn’t. There’s an exquisite nature to it. And there was a lot of luck involved too. AI will never recreate that moment.”