These photos capture the American desert as a fever dream

There’s a line in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 Mexican acid Western film, El Topo, that goes like this: “The desert is circular.” When New York-based photographer Adam Powell watched the film for the first time, he’d almost finished creating his series of work located in the American desert. “I was in disbelief about how much the movie resonated with what I’d been making over the years,” he says. The film influenced the name of his first solo exhibition, The DESERT is a CIRCLE, opening at Diesel Gallery in Tokyo on November 14. 

Powell’s latest work takes you on a journey across the desert, through an infinite stretch of highways, empty landscapes and fleeting motel rooms where time twists and reality blurs. As the British photographer puts it, the show itself is designed to leave the viewer “trapped in this endless, disorienting road trip”. Sure, the circle itself shows up as a recurring motif – including a photo capturing the POV of being inside a barbed wire fence – but there’s also a level of uneasiness embedded in the photos. The DESERT is a CIRCLE feels like flashes of an adventure-filled dream you had and, once you’ve awoken, realised was actually a nightmare. 

Raised in Essex, England, Powell says he grew up with a romanticised version of the US, which consisted of cowboys, Western movies, beautiful landscapes and freedom. But it wasn’t until 2020, when he joined friends on a cross-country road trip, that he fell in love with the American desert. “There was one gas station we stopped at, and I took a photo of this old-school cowboy guy enjoying his lunch, giving me the middle finger,” he says. That image, while not featured in the show, sparked the idea for the entire series. 

Since 2020, Powell has embarked on plenty of disorienting road trips of his own. First, through the Southwest, and then a two-week road trip from Florida to Texas (and back). “That road trip is kind of where I learned what I want to put across in these images,” he says, which is to capture a journey with no clear beginning or end – where the road stretches on forever. Then, Powell returned to the Southwest the following year. Because his trips were predominantly solo, the men featured (often with impressive facial hair) are just people he met along the way.

He would also turn the camera on himself, capturing his own lonely slice of Americana. In one photo, he is in the air, flipped in the foetal position, completely naked. That shot, he says, took 20 attempts and is purposely anonymous. “I wanted it to feel like I’m just a passing character, almost like a side quest on a video game that appears and then goes back into the distance,” he says. “It can be a maddening experience; by the end of these trips, I feel like I’m losing my mind a little bit”. His last flip, he says, was the final image, which is just as well because it was the one that eventually broke the motel bed. 

Powell has a rule for his road trips: if it has over three stars, he doesn’t stay there. It’s gotten him in some sticky situations and caused a couple of close shaves with bedbugs, but it keeps him in an “intense mindset” that feeds the journey. In “The DESERT is a CIRCLE”, he captures close-ups of the strangely beautiful clashing patterns in some of America’s most budget-friendly motels. “In the images we see of American road trips from the 60s, 70s and 80s, these motels were a sign of American prosperity, the highway system was new, and there was a lot of mobility,” he says. “Now time has passed; these rooms have aged, and I think more than anything, design tastes have changed”.

Of course, the US, too, has changed – and so has the rest of the world’s perception of the country. To Powell, an old taxidermy head captures this decay of the American dream. He came across it at an abandoned building off the highway on the way to Arizona. “I walked up to the second floor and stepped out, and the only thing in there beyond the rubble and copious amounts of bird shit was this taxidermy head,” he says. “It was really spooky, but also a really beautiful moment because I feel like I’m a collector in a way, collecting these moments that no one else has.” 

When Powell looks back on his own journey so far – his fashion and commercial projects giving him the chance to travel around the country to capture his twisted, offbeat interpretation of Americana – the symmetry isn’t lost on him. “It feels like a real full-circle situation,” he says.

The DESERT is a CIRCLE opens at Diesel Gallery in Tokyo on Saturday, November 14, and runs until January 11, 2027.