Dylan Newton (Picklefig)

In 2016 I started playing a game called Life is Strange, where you play as a photography student in a fictional Pacific Northwest town. Her approach to photography was to take photos of things she found interesting. This simple concept gave me the desire to go out and photograph the world around me. For Christmas that year, my dad gave me a 35mm Pentax Spotmatic SLR camera and began taking photos with me as a bonding activity. Later in 2018, I started watching movies like Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner, and Ex Machina. I was filled with so much inspiration from those movies and the philosophies that drive them that I wanted to go out and take photos of my cyberpunk world and build my props to make those photos feel as realistic as possible. While having a day job at Guitar Center and working on my bachelor's degree in marketing, I would take two to three days a week to drive from my humble small town of Beaumont Texas to the bustling industrial city of Houston. The grimy downtown streets at night filled my mind with images of a dark and glamorous future. I've been chasing after images of that cyberpunk world ever since.