As a self-taught photographer, what first drew you to pick up a camera? Was there a particular moment or influence that sparked your interest in exploring photography as a form of expression?

 

It was a mixture of boredom and curiosity. My mom had a Nikon N90 film camera that I picked up one day and just started shooting. I was probably 14. My first roll was so underexposed and badly experimental that the photo lab tech wrote “?” on the envelope and apologized to me, thinking he’d made a mistake in developing them. 

 

Your use of vivid, saturated color is one of the most striking aspects of your work. What initially inspired you to experiment with techniques like long exposures, laser pointers, and color gels?

 

I’m more inspired by painting than photography, and using these techniques is my way of bringing in the colors, shapes, and contrasts of abstract expressionist painting. 

 

Your visual language evokes something like a neon-lit ghost story. It is eerie, yet strangely tender. Would you say lighting functions as a kind of storytelling device in your work?

 

It absolutely can, but I’m never thinking in terms of storytelling when I’m making a photo. I’m thinking more like an abstract painter would—focusing on color, balance, shape, tension, composition, and those sorts of things. Sometimes a subject naturally lends itself to storytelling, such as a house with a lit window or something like that, but I’m almost never consciously trying to create a narrative image. 

 

Building on that, how do you think about color when composing an image? Do certain colors carry symbolic or emotional weight, or are they more dictated by conditions like time of day and location?

 

Color is so important to me. I’m hugely indebted to color theory in my work, and I’m often pulling up the color wheel on my phone when deciding on which ones to use. I tend to use blue and red for a few reasons: they’re complementary, and they’re the colors of the high-powered laser pointers I have, which are brighter and more versatile than flashes, so I end up using them a lot. I use red a lot because it’s so striking, can be scary, and complements the deep blue evening sky, which is usually when I shoot. But I’m more drawn to contrast and complements than any one color. Green and pink is a favorite combo, as is orange and pink. If I’m going for something scary, I’ll do red. If I’m going for something dreamy I’ll do pink and orange. I want to use more green, and I actually just bought a green laser pointer, so keep a lookout!

 

What do you typically bring with you in terms of equipment, tools, or even mindset?

 

I bring my camera, a 24-70mm lens, which is what I shoot with 90% of the time, a 100-500mm lens, a handful of filters for black and white photography, two flashes, two laser pointers, two flashlights, a bunch of colored gels, and tripods. 

 

As far as mindset goes, I get very Buddhist on my shoots. I try to have no expectations, no aims, and no goals. I find that when I dictate a shoot with preconceived ideas, I miss the opportunities right in front of me. I try to have an attitude of “If I get a good picture, cool! If I don’t, cool!” I’m usually driving aimlessly around the countryside with the windows down blasting music, which in and of itself is a good time. Shooting is very peaceful and fun. It’s very precious to me, because I feel so free and alive when I’m doing it. 

 

Once you’re on site, what draws you to a particular location or composition? Are you guided more by intuition, atmosphere, or a specific visual idea you’ve planned in advance? How much of the final image is premeditated versus discovered in the moment?

 

This is a great question. It’s never planned in advance, because I almost exclusively shoot locations that I’m seeing for the first time. The atmosphere has little to do with choosing a location either. That said, many abandoned places in the rural American South have a Texas Chainsaw Massacre atmosphere, which isn’t an intentional choice on my part but a fact of the environment (but I love horror so I naturally and enthusiastically lean into it). It’s mostly intuition and having trained my eye to find scenes that will translate well as photos. It’s something I’ve gotten better at with experience. I’m often looking for isolated, simple subjects that I can experiment on (that’s a sentence that would fit perfectly in a horror movie actually). Once I find it, I start playing around with different techniques and colors. This part is all intuition. Often I try all the techniques that have worked before, and if none of those result in something that excites me I have to start truly experimenting. It’s like when chess players make moves “out of book”. When I’m trying something totally new for me, I feel like a newbie photographer again who’s capable of failing, which is scary but also makes it all come alive. It feels like tightrope walking. When I get a good photo it’s like I’ve made it to the other side, which is a thrill. 

 

You’ve spoken about how intuition and experimentation play a major role once you're on site. Do you think being self-taught has given you more freedom to experiment, since your creative instincts weren’t shaped by formal rules or expectations? And more broadly, does your willingness to experiment stem from a certain openness or curiosity that embraces influence from outside photography, like painting or music?

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This is a really insightful question. I think that being self-taught may be a contributing factor in my willingness to experiment. I’m wondering: if a teacher I respected had taught me the rule-of-thirds, for instance, maybe I would feel that I was rebelling against them personally by breaking it? I’m not sure. It is certainly nice to not feel like you have to live up to anyone’s expectations. With age and therapy, I’ve gotten to the point where I feel that way in every aspect of my life. I don’t ever think about living up to my parents’ expectations anymore. But it was probably really healthy for me to always feel that way about photography. And that probably did allow me to experiment more. 

 

I do think that pulling influences from other art forms can help. Photography is an art form that can oftentimes feel overrun by rule followers. People talk about the rule-of-thirds like it’s a real law you should follow. As if by following it you’ll automatically make interesting images. Abstract expressionism, on the other hand, places an emphasis on novelty and point of view and rule-breaking. I think that’s a much more fun place to start from. 

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Could you talk more about the regions you photograph, particularly in the American South; Arkansas, Tennessee, and beyond? How does the landscape influence the mood or meaning of your images?

 

The places I’m shooting are flyover country in every sense. Typically when photographers shoot these places they do so as documentarians chronicling poverty and disenfranchisement, which is necessary and important work. But what I’m going for is more surreal and dreamlike than that. 

 

Many of these places are vastly empty, like the Mississippi River Delta and the Great Plains. For the non-Americans, think of the landscapes in the movies Sinners and Days of Heaven. They often have a forgotten and neglected quality. They can be dreamy, liminal, and nightmarish by turn, which is usually the sort of triangulation of moods I’m working in. Like many of us, I have my share of abandonment issues, which I won’t get into here, but suffice it to say that I have a personal emotional connection to places that feel vast, lonely, forgotten, and lost. To be clear, I don’t do art as a way of healing. I did therapy for that. But I do feel a spiritual connection to these landscapes when I’m in them. 

 

You’ve said that, in the past, these regions didn’t inspire you. They felt bleak and unremarkable. How has your perception of them changed through photography? What does it mean to find beauty in places you once overlooked?

 

When I’m open to them, driving aimlessly for hours, I’ve had some of the most beautiful and spiritual moments of my life—as woo woo as that may sound. In Kansas recently I was driving in the Flint Hills around sunset, big towers of smoke from prescribed burns rising from the horizon and making the air thick, when I came upon a group of black cows on a hilltop, the land falling away in every direction. I got out of my car and greeted them and we shared some (meaningful?) eye contact. It was such a beautiful moment that I wouldn’t have ever experienced had I decided not to get in my car and drive in that random direction at that time of day. Moments like that can transform these places, which I used to view as ugly and unremarkable, as real and beautiful. I travel to SF and SoCal for work often, and I think that if I did photography in those places I wouldn’t have developed my style. If the landscape constantly offers up beauty, what is there to do but document it? Those places are also over-photographed, which tends to make them feel, ironically, unremarkable. I realized at some point that the random abandoned house I find in rural Mississippi is a better subject than the Golden Gate Bridge because no one has shot it before and no one has any preconceived notions of it. 

 

What you said really speaks to that idea of finding beauty where most people wouldn’t think to look. It is realizing that there is indeed a certain beauty in decay. With that, do you think growing up in or around these kinds of landscapes has shaped not only your subject matter but also your way of seeing?

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Maybe. To be fair, I grew up in the firmly middle-class suburbs as a kid and then the upper-middle-class suburbs when my mom remarried, so I wasn’t living around rural decay in my day-to-day life. The neighborhood I grew up in looked a lot like the one in It Follows —to reference another horror movie— a lot of split level 80s architecture. I saw the landscapes I would end up shooting on road trips and things. One time, my Dad drove us deep into Arkansas to track down where it was rumored to have snowed (it doesn’t snow in the South often so this was an event), and we ended up driving through dead, purgatorially endless Mississippi Delta fields for hours. It was such a depressing place, and even more so when we didn’t find snow. I think one way this affected me was that the reality of the landscape was in direct contradiction with the “majesty of God’s creation” I was being taught about in church and by my parents. As a kid, I tried to superimpose the Christian worldview onto the world as I was experiencing it, but it just doesn’t fit. Without a doubt that act of superimposition and the world being unlike how I’ve been told it is has seeped into my work. 

 

You’ve spoken openly about your diagnosis with ME/CFS, which is a chronic illness that has significantly affected your life. For readers unfamiliar with the condition, could you share how it has shaped your daily reality?

 

ME/CFS is a chronic illness commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It presents in many ways, has many causes, and often causes other chronic illnesses, like a hydra sprouting additional heads. But I’m only an expert in the version of it I have so I’ll stick to talking about that. And instead of giving my long personal history of it or the WebMD version, I’ll just talk about how it affects my daily life now. 

 

The hallmark of ME/CFS is the crash. A crash is a debilitating condition in which I’m so sapped of energy that I’m bed-ridden. Loud sounds, music, TV, concentrating on even a podcast—everything is such an assault on my senses that I have to block it all out and lie in bed in total silence and darkness, too exhausted to do anything, but unable to sleep. It’s like a living death. A crash can last for days, weeks, or months at a time.

 

There’s no cure but there are treatments—I take about 8 medications and supplements, which all essentially perform the same task: prevent the next crash. I also have to avoid stress, alcohol, drugs, exercise, overexertion, overheating, red meat, and other things. When it comes to shooting, I have to take a bunch of beta blockers and vasoconstrictors in order to keep my heart rate down while shooting—if my heart rate gets too high it can trigger a crash. Some days I have so much brain fog that I have to just lie around not doing anything. Some days I get this weird thing I call “chest fatigue” which is a localized feeling of exhaustion in my sternum where my vagus nerve is. I take it as a warning sign that I need to chill out and rest. Basically, crash avoidance is my life now, but as bad as it may sound, it has led me to a deeper understanding of who I am and provided clarity on some of the bigger choices in my life. Kids, for instance. I wouldn’t be able to be the father I would like to be with this illness, so we’ve chosen not to have kids. 

 

It’s also given me the space to adopt a life-changing meditation practice and interest in Buddhism, which has helped me let go of expectations and embrace change. The illness sucks, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but it has, ironically, painfully, led me to greater happiness and self-acceptance. 

 

How did your illness bring you back to photography? In what ways have those limitations influenced or clarified your artistic voice?

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Such a good question. Before my illness I was a writer. I went to an MFA program and Clarion West Writers Workshop and had a daily writing practice. I worked according to a schedule and was incredibly disciplined, but when none of that resulted in the success I dreamed of, I got stressed, anxious, and depressed. Those emotional spirals were a major contributing factor to my first ME/CFS crashes. One of the turning points in my illness (and life) was to understand that hard work will not always lead to success. It can instead lead to frustration, burnout, and, in my case, crashes. This realization upended my life in ways that seemed tragic at the time but have ended up being really beneficial to me as an artist and person. 

 

I went back to photography because it always came naturally to me. I always felt that I have a good handle on it and that I created work that meant something to me. Whereas writing was some self-righteous struggle to create something big and beautiful and meaningful, photography was easy and fun. I used to mistake “easy” and “fun” for “unimportant” and “not real art”. I thought that art was something you should struggle to do—no pain, no gain or something like that. But I don’t believe that at all anymore. The only real joy of making art is the making of it. If making it isn’t enjoyable, why would I do it? 

 

Your images are clearly shaped by a deeply personal creative process. In contrast, we’re now seeing artificial intelligence play a growing role in visual art. What are your thoughts on AI in the creative world? Do you see it as something that ultimately enhances or threatens artistic expression? And on a personal level, do you think artists should embrace it, resist it, or find some middle ground?

 

These large language models were created by people who don’t enjoy being creative. The people who make AI art don’t enjoy being creative either, with maybe a couple of exceptions. That’s the biggest difference between artists and AI artists, and it’s why artists look at AI artists with pity and frustration. AI artists are missing the point. Creating art is to be in a state of play and freedom. It’s its own reward. To avoid it and focus only on the final product is to miss out on one of the greatest, most beautiful, uniquely human activities in the world. I would rather drive around the countryside listening to music, finding an old building, shooting for hours, and not getting anything than sit on my laptop and ask ChatGPT to conjure up an image.

 

Should we embrace, resist, or find a middle ground? We can’t fully embrace it because of the negative impact it poses to the environment, the human artists it steals from, and probably a hundred other bad things that will only become evident in the fullness of time. But pure resistance seems impossible seeing as it’s quickly being implemented in every aspect of our lives without our consent. Even as I’m writing these answers in the iOS Notes app, the icon for AI writing assistance is hovering in my periphery, offering an easier way. I was driving from San Jose to San Francisco recently and all the billboards are about AI and are written in an unsettling future-speak. Even if you resist the technology, can you resist the ways the culture is changing because of it? 

 

On your website, you also showcase writing and collage work. Do you see these forms as part of the same creative universe as your photography? And do you ever think about combining them (i.e. writing narratives that accompany your visual work, or making collages out of the images)?

 

Writing is in a very different universe. I still haven’t really discovered what place it has in my life post-illness. I was absolutely married to it before and now I keep it at arm’s length. Maybe one day I’ll find a healthier relationship with it. 

 

I got really into collage in 2024, partly as a way to explore color and composition in a more abstract way than I do with photography, and partly as a way to stop compartmentalizing myself as one type of artist. Before my illness, I poured all of my energy into writing and saw myself as a writer-only. But now I don’t put any sort of labels on myself. If I want to explore an art form now, I give it a shot. I haven’t been very interested in collage this year, but I have been trying songwriting. I’m not very good at it, and I really need to work on my voice, which is bad, but it’s been a fun thing to try. I’m not sure if anything will come of it, but I’m fully embracing trying new things when they seem fun to do. 

 

As far as cross-pollinating art forms, I am doing that with my upcoming photo book, which segues nicely into your next question!

 

I’ve read that you’ve been working on your first photography book, Vanishing Twin. What can we expect from the book? And could you share a bit about the thought behind the name and the project?

 

Yes! The book is finished, and I’m currently shopping it around to publishers. It’s a collection of photos and prose vignettes that are an attempt to articulate how I feel in the treatment phase of my illness. Vanishing Twin is the name of a medical phenomenon in which one embryo of a twin pregnancy will die in utero and be absorbed by the surviving embryo. This actually happened to me and my twin (I’m the surviving embryo, hi). And it also describes how I feel looking back on who I was before my illness—a twin who died; me but not me. 

 

To close, I always find it interesting to hear what other artists are drawn to. Whether it’s photography, film, music, books, or something else entirely; what has been inspiring you?

 

I love everything. I’m a huge fan of music. My wife and I first met because we played in a band together. She plays piano, and I play bass, drums, and guitar; we’re also avid record collectors. We love seeing shows, too. My current favorite albums are Apres coup by Laurie Torres and the new Sterolab.

 

I love movies, too. My favorite directors are Michael Haneke, Thomas Vinterberg, and PT Anderson. My recent favorite movie is Anora. My favorite can-watch-anytime movie is Jurassic Park. And the one that makes me so happy I can explode is Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. I have lots of sisters, and that movie captures the joy of adolescence surrounded by siblings so well. 

 

I love TV. Andor is the best show I’ve seen in a long time. I have a, some might say, uncharacteristic love for the 90 Day Fiancé universe and its spinoffs. 

 

I’m a huge reader, too. I love strange, surreal novels that make me feel like I’m unglued from reality. Some recent favorites are Earthlings, A Touch of Jen, and Is Mother Dead. 

 

I love art of all forms, but I’m most inspired by painting, especially abstract. My recent obsession is Mernet Larsen. Other than those things, my biggest source of inspiration is probably meditation. When I slow down my brain and enter a state of stillness and peace, I usually find the energy to create. 

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For anyone interested in learning more about chronic illness, particularly ME/CFS, the CDC offers a helpful overview. To see more of Mounce’s work, visit gardnermounce.com.