There have been many photographers drawn to capture the American landscape in black and white. Among them, of course, is Ansel Adams, whose commission from the United States Department of the Interior to document the country’s national parks still stands like a monument to the vast and awesome scale of Mother Nature in the States.

But if Adams’ USA is mythic, vast and epic, others have seen it on a more human scale – and many have done so by answering the call of the road, which is something we also think of as being peculiarly American, thanks largely to Mr Kerouac and his cult classic On the Road and the many road movies made since that seem to be imbued with its Beat spirit.

Jason Lee knows about movies. The actor has appeared in numerous films, including many by director Kevin Smith, like Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma, and he also starred as Earl Hickey in TV’s My Name is Earl. He is, however, one of life’s polymaths who excels in many areas. A former pro-skateboarder, he has also been taking photographs seriously since the early 2000s. Now, some two decades later, he is following in the footsteps – or in the context we are discussing, maybe that should be tyre tracks – of some great photographers of the American landscape.

Lee’s new exhibition, Selected American Photographs 2008 – 2020, which is currently at the Leica Gallery in Mayfair, harks back not so much to Adams’ black-and-white epic America but the more modest environment made up of buildings, petrol stations, stores and cafés as captured by the lenses of Walker Evans, Robert Frank and William Christenberry. Lee himself cites the New Topographics photographers as an influence, particularly Henry Wessel.

The method is pure Kerouac. Hitting the road, Lee headed off to shoot in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, New York State, Oregon, Texas and Utah to capture what he saw with his camera.

The reflective pictures he made on his journey, often free of any human presence, have a haunting quality, inviting us to ask questions in the way that a Hopper painting suggests an out-of-grasp narrative. The subtle, monochrome tones of the prints, all done by Lee himself, create an impression of timelessness.

‘Since my first photographic outings in my native California in 2006, where I explored a more rural, perhaps neglected face of the state, and the many subsequent outings zigzagging through the West Coast, the Southwest, and Texas, I remain fascinated by the American landscape, by evidence of cancellation and departure and the environmental contradictions that make up our collective everyday view,’ says Lee. ‘These conflicts, at once strange and beautiful, this is where the questions are. It’s then and now splitting time, man and nature pushing up against each other, and progress forever forcing itself on the contented. And somewhere in the middle you make pictures.’

The exhibition also marks the release of TX | CA 17, a monograph by Lee. This documents another road trip, from Texas to Los Angeles, which Lee made in the summer of 2017, and chronicles the journey chronologically from North Texas to New Mexico, Arizona, the desert in California and Downtown LA.

Signed copies of the monograph and prints from the exhibition are for sale, along with copies of In the Gold Dust Rush, a previous book of photographs by Lee, published by Stanley/Barker, which also produced TX | CA 17.

Selected American Photographs 2008 – 2020 by Jason Lee is on at the Leica Gallery London until June 11, 2023. leica-camera.com