Initially I borrowed the word “perverse” from Roland Barthes, meaning pleasure-driven and not geared to inform or promote a service or a product. An unproductive photograph designed to keep you in the process of looking is of course something larger than an expression of aberrant sexuality.

I am fascinated by how images and motifs move between and adjust to different cultures. I'm a Norwegian living in Los Angeles showing a photograph inspired by Japanese image culture in an American beach town named after a sinking city in Italy.

I like to put a single photograph in different contexts, to see how it takes on other meanings, how being locked in a new dialogue exposes another potential. It's like dating other people in order to get to know yourself.

It's easy to play fun forms, surfaces, and languages against each other. Teenagers do this every day, producing winning memes from random patterns. I need the joke to hurt more; I want it to sink deeper than the postmodern grin.

I'd like the photographs to potentially be meaningful to a wide range of people. They do not grow out of the reportage mode, this was always clear to me. Personal imaginations blend into each other and create our visual cultures. No one is a neutral observer of this field.

I often have to feel my way through the alternatives. The 99-cent store is attractive because it offers objects that aren't promoted in glossy magazines. The work then becomes a form of alchemy.

I'm experimenting and pushing as far as I can. I typically don't know what I was aiming for until I see what I ended up with. Then I can study and choose.