Making photographs can be a way for me to bring something up and into consciousness, something either shared or individual.

Initially I borrowed the word "perverse" for my works from Roland Barthes, meaning pleasure-driven and not geared to inform or promote a service or a product.

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 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.

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.

Tactility was rejected in conceptual photography. I embrace the possibilities of my medium. Surface, texture, and tactility is something analog photography can do well, or it is something I can do well in analog photography. It can be hard to know what or who is in control.