When I was twelve or thirteen, I immersed myself into making 3D art. I was really into downloading elevation data online and using it to render landscape scenes I’d seen on family trips, as well as ‘gritty’ city scenes. I picked up a camera to start trying to take pictures of textures to use in my fake city. At one point, my father just asked why I wasn’t taking pictures of what I was modelling, and things kind of clicked. Why not just go take a picture in the first place?

I don’t think it would be possible, honestly. It’s absolutely a product of my environment.

Occasionally I use Google Maps to identify areas I’d like to travel to – for example, a specific suburb under construction –, but mostly I just go with my gut and drive around.

In 2016, I spent a month on the road (sixteen thousand kilometres) mostly taking photographs, obviously with some leisure added in. Several times a year, I take long weekend trips (within the last month, to the Inland Empire in Southern California, and another to the southern Oregon coast) and try to do some marathon photography over two days.

One of my first introductions to art photography (not just computer wallpaper landscape schlock) was DiCorcia’s Hustlers. I fell in love with his use of gas stations, fast food restaurants, motels, and supermarkets as backgrounds. I don’t have the same human connection he does, I suppose, and I gravitate towards more Hopper-esque scenes without a soul around. Hopper, though, seems to have a bit more hope in his paintings -– I was recently reading Art Can Help, the recent Robert Adams collection of essays, and his analysis of Sunday Morning has stuck with me. It’s an empty scene, but there’s almost a sense of anticipation – the sun rises further, the shops open, the people emerge from their homes, and life begins again. I want my images to be the opposite, an end: the day is over, the night has come, everyone has left, there’s nothing left to look forward to.

I’ve always been a fan of the Coen brothers, specifically Fargo and No Country for Old Men, although these days I don’t find myself having much patience for watching films.

Just drive. Grab an atlas, leave Portland, skip the Willamette Valley, and go exploring. Every highway leads somewhere interesting.

I always enjoy visiting Astoria, a small town at the mouth of the Columbia River. There’s a sense of finality there, seeing a massive river that feeds the region terminate into the ocean. Knowing that it’s near the site of the first by-land European contact with the indigenous people gives it sort of a special feeling, as if it’s one of the first places where things started going downhill.

I definitely spent too much time on the Internet arguing with people about food photography. I was pretty tired of the magazine aesthetic people were aping instead of trying to be interesting, so I made the stylised nachos and threw a copy of Bon Appétit at the base of it. Lately, I’ve been less into constructing scenes, partially because I can afford to travel more, and partially because I’m not constantly arguing pointlessly online; although that’s a theme I’m sure to return to at some point.

Pictures, specifically, I don’t know. I try not to think too hard about what I’m photographing, I would rather let it come to me. Although lately, I’ve been thinking about Anchorage or Pittsburgh, both towns seem to have the kind of decay I look for. Beyond the United States, I’d love to go to Bangui in the Central African Republic. I learned about it one day when looking at maps of population density and trying to find places in the world that have a similar feeling to the American high desert.

I’ve been playing with a lot of 35mm black and white after picking up a Contax T3, and I’m hoping to work it into a large enough body of work to show around. But for now, I’m just going to keep shooting as much as I can.