Tag Christof – art director, editor, and roaming photographer – talks about his photographic series “America is Dead.” Capturing a crumbling era of American architectural history, Tag’s photographs warn against building on a “system that defines progress only in economic terms.”

Can you give us a brief background for yourself?

You know Harry Dean Stanton’s character in Paris, Texas? That’s pretty much me. I was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico and have sort of just been wandering for as long as I can remember. I’ve lived in a few countries, speak a few languages and would have loved to live in an age where hitchhiking and hopping trains were things you could still do. I’m prone to selling my belongings and just hitting the road for the sheer romance of it.

My background is in industrial design, but I realized pretty early on that I was just terrible at making user-friendly blenders and door handles, so I’ve spent my 20s more or less at the fringes of design. Little by little, I think I’m finding a place as an observer.

Where do you consider home?

New Mexico will always be home. It’s breathtaking and untamed and is one of the last places in America that properly has its own culture. My family has centuries-old roots there and there’s no better light in the world for photography. Lately I can’t stop daydreaming about moving back and buying an old adobe fixer upper…

Still, for all its beauty, it can be a very isolating place. I can be a very solitary person, so I know I’m always better off in a big city, where my friends will force me out of the house once in a while. I would never say no to a move back to Milan or London, but I’ve always imagined that my “grown up” home would be Los Angeles. It’s the only city I’ve ever lived in that doesn’t feel at all confining or constricting.

How would you describe your working life? (You seem to do quite a lot!)

I think it’s taking shape, somehow. After college, I ended up teaching French until I had an opportunity to move to Florence for a course. After about a year there, I moved to Milan to intern as an agent in a fashion photography agency and ended up staying for a couple of years. I eventually left Milan for good in 2011 to attend graduate school at Central Saint Martins in London. British postgrads are relatively open-ended, so my time there allowed me to take a detour into architecture. I studied with one of the best model makers in England, did research at a community design studio in Hackney and spent a summer at UCLA’s architecture school.

After graduating in 2013, I sold everything I had, gave away my guitar, and wandered for a few months. I came back to the U.S. and bought an amazing heap of a ’73 Pontiac on eBay for a few hundred bucks and drove that around until I got a job at Need Supply Co. and moved to Virginia.

Nowadays, I spend all of my free time working on projects. I contribute to a few magazines and am officially/unofficially working on two books — I’m hoping they go somewhere this year. I spend every weekend I can afford out on the road taking photos. Mostly, I read a lot, write a lot, and waste a lot of money on film and gas. In my dream life, I end up something like a hybrid of Dave Hickey and Iwan Baan.

What do you do for Need Supply Co.?

I’m an art director, responsible for our editorial output. I work alongside the creative director and the rest of the team to tie up everything from our blog to seasonal campaigns and I edit our print magazine, Human Being Journal. I haven’t been there too long, but my coworkers are brilliant and I’m excited about where we’re going.

What is the project America is Dead?

In 2010, I had moved back to the states from Milan to attend an industrial design grad program that I had worked like mad to get into. I was dismayed to find out after I arrived that the curriculum was super corporate — design as pure profit maximiser — and this was at a school originally founded by Moholy-Nagy! I was totally disillusioned and ended up deciding that I didn’t want to get into six-figure student debt to end up a VP of human factors at McDonalds.

The few months after leaving were an existential crisis: I had left a career path I had been dead sure about and had no idea what to do next. I went back to New Mexico and borrowed an old car from my grandparents, figuring I’d crash in a cheap motel for a night or two, clear my head, and then turn around. But I just kept going. I had traveled alone quite a bit before, but never on the road. It was exhilarating.

I avoided the interstates entirely and slept in the car at truck stops, in Waffle House parking lots, on beaches all along the Gulf Coast and made it as far as Miami by only spending money on cheap food and gas. I pretty much survived on diner coffee and grilled cheese.

On that trip, the photos were entirely incidental. I had a crap digital camera and no skills, but I was so drawn to these un-places that most Americans seem not to notice at all — especially the giant dead shopping malls. I had an old book about a defunct store chain called BEST Products, which in the 1970s and 1980s had built these incredible subversions of big box stores, and so mid-trip I decided to change course and try to find whatever remained of them. Two weeks later, I rolled back to New Mexico, sunburned and filthy and transformed. From that point on, all I wanted to do was be out on the road.

I went back to work in Milan a month later, bought a 35mm junker and set about trying to learn photography from scratch. I spent the next year half-starved and stayed in every night to save money for another trip. That spring a good friend and photographer I greatly admire, Jamie Ho, joined me out on the road and we’ve since done a solid 10,000 miles or more together—she can’t do stick-shift so I always drive, but we’ve learned to sleep in cars in dodgy parking lots together like pros!

I’m trying to see as much of that invisible, outmoded America as I can. It’s disappearing a lot faster than you might think.

Your photographs are really beautiful, emitting a certain loneliness and evidence of a storied history. What about these settings attracts you most? What are you trying to capture?

Thank you! I think they’ve only recently become a bit beautiful, if you can call them that. More than anything I suppose they’re contemplative. There are a lot of people who have gotten attention over the past few years for ‘ruin porn,’ and I always stress that my work has nothing to do with that. I’m not looking for corpses to gawk at or draw linear conclusions from. I’m l looking for subtle signifiers of a bygone exuberance — and whether people realize it or not, the things I photograph are the direct result of a system that defines progress only in economic terms.

I’m really fascinated by architectural renderings, too. They’re images that stand in for some hopeful, speculative future. They’re also super clean and devoid of real people. For a lot of the landscapes — the malls especially — I try to frame them to mimic renderings, with dignified and sometimes exaggerated proportions. It’s only upon closer inspection that you can tell they’re ruins. They’re optimistic 1960s and 1970s renderings come full circle.

How would you describe your relationship to America?

I have so much reverence for this country. Bonkers politics aside, you can’t possibly drive from coast to coast without being in total awe of its size and diversity. One country that can contain New Orleans and Los Angeles and D.C. and deserts and glaciers and tropics is just… incredible.

You’ve recently had some negative feedback about the name America is Dead claiming it’s too negative, untrue etc. How do you respond? And why the name?

Oh man, if I had a dollar for every time… I put the name on some early photos and it just stuck. I am happy that it seems to touch a nerve, though. I get people who assume I’m an anti-Obama crusader and loads who are just bewildered that anyone would build a narrative that they feel diminishes or bashes the country. The project really has nothing to do with patriotism or politics or even nostalgia.

It’s about observing a system, its architecture and cities and economics, in action. It just so happens that the dying populist symbols I photograph are the same things that defined this country for so long—shopping malls, motels, suburbs, drive-ins…

The name has gotten me into real trouble more than once, though. For instance, a couple years ago in Las Vegas two security guards at the then abandoned Sahara tackled me and then zip-tied me to a lamp post after they caught me on the wrong side of a fence. When the police arrived, they released me, mostly thanks to the serious-looking old anvil of a camera I was carrying. Still, one good natured cop wanted to see the sort of photos I’d risk trespassing for, so I pulled out my phone, loaded my Tumblr and when he saw its title went totally berserk.

What is the plan for the photos?

For now, I just want to keep making them. I’ve had bits and pieces in group shows, but I’d love to do a proper exhibition sometime soon. It goes without saying that I’d love to do a book, but I’m waiting for the opportunity to do something rigorous and beautiful, with some academic weight behind it.

Pie in the sky, but much later down the road, I would love to somehow gather the dozen or so contemporary photographers making really good work in this new American landscapes space — Brian Ulrich, Patrick Joust, Missy Prince, Mitch Epstein, Alec Soth and about a dozen others — for a “New New Topographics” show.

If you could share a meal with anyone dead/alive – who?

Jacob Holdt or Stephen Shore or Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac… Any of the greats who were so enchanted by America they crisscrossed her a million times and made her their muse.

Favorite book?

Learning From Las Vegas

Favorite photograph of all time—someone else’s.

Bas Princen’s Ringroad Houston. I’ve been mildly obsessed with generic 1980s modernist buildings covered in reflective glass because they are so striking yet they totally disappear into their surroundings. There’s something sinister and evasive about them—think about the images of NSA headquarters that were so widely circulated after Snowden.

I’ve never been able to photograph one well, so I jumped out of my seat when I saw this one for the first time at a lecture Bas Princen gave at the AA in London a few years ago. It is exactly the photo I’d been trying to create.

© Bas Princen – Ringroad Houston

Favorite photograph of all time–yours.

I don’t think I’ve taken that one yet!

See more of Tag’s work on his website. And follow him on Instagram – he’s one of our favorites!