Jay Toups is an American fine art and adventure photographer who has spent years living out of a converted fire rescue truck and other self-built expedition vehicles while traveling to remote landscapes across multiple continents. He believes humans and nature are inescapably connected, and his photographs focus less on the places he visits than on the feelings those places evoke in him.
Toups holds a degree in art history and traces his visual sensibility to the dark, emotive quality of Renaissance and Romantic painting and its use of color to tell a story. In 2012 he read the novel Cloud Atlas, and a line from it, “Find me under the Corsican stars, where we first kissed”, set him on a decade-long ambition to photograph Corsica, which he finally realized in the summer of 2022 for the series Corsican Stars. In 2025 he drove 20,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean, 8,000 of them off-road, threading together a network of abandoned gold rush roads north of Vancouver using skills from two years of work with mapping software, a year-long trip that became the series Sea and Sea.
