It’s eight in the morning in sunny Los Angeles when we ‘Zoom call’ with photographer Hayley Eichenbaum. Hayley is immaculately put together for this early in the day. She always wakes up between 4 and 6 AM, when she’s creatively at her best. We talk about road trips, the importance of words and how she would sneak out of class to spend time in her studio...

Q
Your work has this amazing old Hollywood feel to it, almost an ode to the American dream?
A
My first solo-show in LA was actually called ‘The Preservation of Romance’. They were Southwestern Americana road trip photos. For me a lot of that area, particularly the Southwest, is about the loving care that people have put in these dilapidated highways. Before commercial flights were a thing, those roads were the heart of everything. They connected all corners of America. There are so many businesses that thrived back in the day. And they still put so much care and love into these spaces. I just remembered thinking: ‘They preserve the romance of route 66’.

Q
Can you tell us a bit more about your process. How much, and what kind of research goes into these road trips?
A
My father is a writer and he really instilled the love for words in me, so the dictionary app on my phone is crucial. To me everything starts with language, whether it’s a word or a sentence. Then I’ll start unpacking that word or phrase, looking at the definitions, synonyms. And I’ll write about my relationship to that concept, that word. From there I’ll pull things that I think are interesting conceptually and that is often the starting point of my imagery.