About a year ago, photographer James Gooding was flipping through a copy of The New Yorker when he came across an article that, once he'd read it, he couldn't shake. Titled "There and Back Again" and written by Nick Paumgarten, the piece was about urban sprawl and commuting. But as he cataloged the discontents of the exurb class, Paumgarten touched on a theory of a triangle of happiness. "Where you live, where you work, where you shop—those are the three points," explains Gooding. "And I began to wonder, where on that triangle do I find my happiness in a given day? Where does anyone?" Those questions went on to form the premise of Gooding's latest series of photographs, "The Triangulation of Happiness." Now on view at the Diesel Denim Gallery in Soho, the series is composed of triptych works, portraits of each of Gooding's far-flung subjects at home, at work, and at retail. The project that began with an article about commuting required Gooding to do a fair amount of commuting himself—par for the course for an Englishman preoccupied with the lifestyles and landscapes of his adopted United States—but before he hopped on a jet back to L.A., Gooding chatted with Style.com about peak emotions, Wikipedia, and life on the road.

In the New Yorker magazine article, the stuff about the live-work-shop triangle doesn't take up much space. It's like, one short paragraph. You seem to have extrapolated quite a bit from that.

Yeah, that paragraph was just a jumping-off point. His whole article made a big impression, but it was the idea of the triangle that got me painting images in my head. I kept imagining people ferrying themselves from one place to the other, always the same routine, and somewhere on that map of points they make, there's happiness. Floating around, elusive.

I find it a very oppressive concept. Like, we're all just rats creating our own mazes.

The concept struck me as both beautiful and sad. The thing about happiness is, we're not very good at measuring it for ourselves, or figuring out what in our lives genuinely makes us happy, versus what we only think does, or will. You may believe your happiness is about having a big house, but if having the big house means you have to spend all your time working at a job you hate, or even just tolerate, and it takes you two hours in traffic each way to get there and back, how happy has that house made you? Speaking from my own personal experience, I'd say that people have a set point of happiness—one person's up here, and someone else is down there—and most of what we do in the pursuit of happiness is just the seeking out of peak emotions.

Judging by your essays in the catalog, you got pretty immersed in your subjects' lives. How did you find all of them?

Honestly? Wikipedia. Well, that's sort of a half answer. I knew I wanted a good cross section, so I went to Wikipedia and looked up job descriptions. There's an entry on the site about a thousand pages long; all it does is list job titles. I scrolled through, picked out a few that seemed interesting—or in some cases, particularly uninteresting—and then I started sending out e-mails, seeing if my friends knew anyone who knew anyone, and so on. But some of my subjects I met on the road, too. That's an advantage of being English, occasionally—people are sort of intrigued by my accent, I think.

Shooting this series entailed a pretty much nonstop commute for you, and according to Paumgarten's piece, every extra ten minutes you spend getting from here to there knocks another ten percentage points off your cumulative happiness. So I must ask: How's your triangle?

Are you asking if I'm happy? That's a good question; I suppose I'm about as happy as I typically am. If you'd mapped my triangle while I was working on "Triangulation," at least the shooting part of it, it certainly would have looked rather strange—work, work, work; driving, driving, driving. Sleeping in motels, eating in the car, shopping for nothing but film. But I'm gearing up for another round of the same in the spring, so I guess that must mean I like to keep moving.

"The Triangulation of Happiness" is open through April 1 at the Diesel Denim Gallery, 98 Greene St., NYC, and will move to Galerie du Jour in Paris later this year.