00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 When I was a kid, how did I become an artist?
00:07 There wasn't an option.
00:08 Because my mother was a professional artist,
00:11 it was kind of a given that she would facilitate
00:15 my abilities and nurture them as much as she could.
00:19 If I had tried to be a lawyer, she would have disowned me.
00:23 So it's just natural.
00:25 I'm not happy unless I'm creating something.
00:28 My name is Nick Mills.
00:30 I'm from New York originally,
00:32 and I am an artist of many different media.
00:36 Now it's portrait photography.
00:38 I was accepted at the prestigious Cooper Union
00:43 School of Art, and then summarily expelled two years later.
00:48 Immediately hit the streets of New York
00:51 selling airbrush design t-shirts,
00:53 which ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, luckily.
00:57 I painted the murals at Indochine, New York,
00:59 which is one of the hot restaurants of the city.
01:02 So I always seemed to fall into these lucky breaks.
01:06 I always had an idea of what to do,
01:08 and I would just try it and do it.
01:10 And somehow I always got lucky that it worked.
01:14 I never made money, but I never starved.
01:16 My mother did these beautiful Easter eggs.
01:21 So I built a little studio and I took my lamps,
01:26 my soft boxes, and I shot the eggs.
01:29 And I had a friend who's a cinematographer.
01:32 He's a cameraman.
01:33 He helped me to figure out how to do this high key lighting
01:36 to really make the eggs look beautiful.
01:39 And then I thought, you know,
01:40 I could put a person's head in this larger version
01:43 of the same setup.
01:45 And so I did.
01:46 I had some friends come over and I took their picture
01:48 and I thought, wow, this is really something.
01:52 I wanted to catalog and record the fashion statements
01:57 of the young people in Portland, Oregon, the hipster look.
02:01 And I had come from New York where there was the punk look.
02:04 And before that, when I was a little kid,
02:06 there were hippies and I watched these changes.
02:09 And then here's this hipster look.
02:10 And I thought I'm going to capture this.
02:12 So I built on the back of my pickup truck,
02:14 the photo studio, and I recorded the hipster look
02:17 by driving around into different neighborhoods,
02:20 parking and holding photo sessions.
02:23 That started in 2015 and I did it for one whole summer
02:27 and it was embraced right away.
02:28 I would shoot from six, seven o'clock
02:33 until two in the morning and it would feel like one hour.
02:36 And I thought, wow, if I'm in Portland.
Comments