His soft-focus technique and striking tonal effects brought fat fees for portraits in Hollywood.  But he eventually became fed up with retouching, cropping and special effects; "I've compromised and sold myself."  He scraped the emulsion from prize-winning plates and used the glass for window panes.   Then he traveled to Mexico to start again.

In 1937 he received a $2,000 Guggenheim fellowship; he traveled 35,000 miles photographing the American West using a minimum of equipment. He usually employed the smallest aperture and almost never retouched or cropped, producing images that were very realistic.