Photographs taken with normal lenses naturally diminish the size of distant objects. In this image that Renaissance perspective has been defeated. Using electronic means, I have elevated and enlarged the mountain range by a factor of three, and likewise stretched the foreground trees and slope. This has organized space more explicitly into overlapping planes: foreground forest, mountains, then sky.

Painters like El Greco and Paul Cezanne exercised this kind of omnipotence at will. They exaggerated, elongated and manipulated the volumes and size of the objects and masses in their pictures to create psychological effects — the most important things according to the artist were emphasized this way. The mountains in our picture seem more massive, the Joshua Trees more imposing, hoping to carry more weight in the viewer’s mind.