Sally Mann

I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.