[1][2] His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s[1] through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975.

Then in 1947 they moved to Madison, Wisconsin for five years, where he contracted polio at age 12 in 1949 in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover.

[3] In 1960 while at Redlands, he met and married Kerstin Mornestam, a Swedish native, who shared the same interest in the arts and nature.

He soon read complete sets of Camera Work and Aperture at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

[3] He met John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a trip to New York City in 1969.

[5] Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility.

What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is what has been lost and what remains" and that "his work's other great subtext" is silence.