On a day in mid-May, Jason Lee is in his 1994 Lincoln town car, headed north from his home in Texas to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His first solo photography exhibit opens on June 1, and he’s on the way to oversee its installation. On the way, the 49-year-old actor has “road time,” and though he usually listens to cassette tapes, today he’s on a Bluetooth earpiece, talking about his love for some of the most forgotten and overlooked places in America. “We have iPhones and Sonics and Dairy Queens now,” he says, “but it’s essentially the same conflicted landscape that it was a hundred years ago.”

A little over a decade ago, the actor known for his roles in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and Chasing Amy and his beloved sitcom My Name Is Earl started taking road trips around the West and bringing a few cameras along. “I was just kind of aimlessly roaming California, and then I started exploring Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas,” he says. Texas stuck with him, and four years ago, he moved his family from Los Angeles, looking for more space to raise their growing family.

Lee, his wife, Ceren, and their five kids—Pilot, Sonny, Casper, Alberta, and newborn Edith—live outside of Denton, Texas. “It’s like a small Austin…And where we live is in the country. It’s all green and windy roads, and there’s horses and cows everywhere you look.” A typical day for the Lee family consists of cooking, riding bikes, and lots of outdoor time. They read books together before bed. Sometimes the kids are allowed to watch a little television.

“I’ve learned as a father, you have that instinct to want to teach them everything and correct everything right away,” Lee says. “And then you learn to just chill out and just let things unfold and when they need you, they’ll ask.”

When he’s not with his family, he’s usually on the road, using vintage cameras and lenses, and, at times, expired film to capture the “kind of landscape that exists all around America,” he says. “I tend to be sort of nostalgic, very sentimental,” says Lee. “There is definitely some nostalgia for road-tripping, being out on the road, exploring parts of America that you’ve not seen before, the memories that come to mind from childhood, or even from cinema.”

That vague, backcountry “Everytown America” feeling is a prevailing theme of Lee’s photography, which he has already collected in a book and featured on the Instagram film photography gallery @filmphotographic. Derelict, abandoned homes in open fields and dusty stretches of flat, long road are rendered in warm, temperate hues. It’s almost like he is still the skate kid looking for that perfect skate spot, which inevitably always seems to be somewhere abandoned, graffitied, forgotten. “One hundred percent. The camera has basically just replaced the skateboard,” he says. His photographs are also inspired by the films that he loves. In conversation, he cites Paris, Texas, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and David Byrne’s True Stories, his source for that “Texas color palette.”

“Badlands was made in the ’70s. Paris, Texas, was made in 1984,” he says. “You can roam these parts of America and much of it feels the same. Or you can go around and find things that look like William Christenberry’s Alabama photos from four decades ago. And the story and the landscape, I think, kind of just keeps telling the same story, generationally.”

Lee’s work is mostly devoid of humans but signs of life exist in nearly every photograph—a clothesline strung up under an overpass; nature reclaiming cars that have been left behind. “In the early days of photography, they didn’t have to contend with smog and pollution. It gets hard to just have a photograph without some sense of air pollution, littering, trash, noise. And so my thinking is you may as well show it because it’s there, and that’s the American social landscape,” he continues. “It makes you wonder how far back we need to go to find that point where things really started not only evolving, but then devolving.”

The solo exhibition at the Philbrook began to percolate after the museum asked him to explore Oklahoma on his next set of road trips. His 15-year-old son, Pilot Inspektor Lee, made a short documentary about his father’s process, seen here for the first time. “He shoots Super 8 film, 16 millimeter, and digital video. He’s super hooked,” says Lee. “That pale blue sky and the cotton clouds. He knew to overexpose his video, and get that flatter look. I’m really proud of him.”

Though he was once chased out of a town by a local who, Lee surmises, thought his town car and medium-format camera looked suspicious, photography has given Lee inroads to meet the locals around his adopted home. “I’ve literally had people buy prints because it was the town that they lived in,” he says. “They’ve said to me, ‘I lived there and I drove by that grain silo all the time while dreaming about getting out of that town.’”

Photography will be keeping Lee busy for the near future—he has three books of photography coming out over the next three years—but he is also thinking about getting back to acting. Nothing is set in stone, but a few projects could emerge, and he’d love to provide some closure to fans of My Name Is Earl, which ended on a cliff-hanger. “Relatively soon, I want to switch that part of my brain back on and get trucking,” he says. “It sounds stupid, but I’m just proud to have just been able to do it in general…. I never considered myself to be a tremendous actor, by any means. And so you just try to have fun with it.”

Ultimately, though, photography is much less like acting than his first career, skateboarding. “Acting just feels so different,” he says. “You’re in front of the camera. You’re memorizing dialogue. You’re just constantly thinking about, Is this good? Am I doing it right? With photography and skateboarding, it’s just you creating the thing yourself, by yourself, on your own. And that very personal, intimate experience, it’s unparalleled.”

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