Love and Darkness by My Side

New Years Eve 1999.

I was living in downtown Chicago, and my then girlfriend and I were desperately roving the South-Loop district. We had been trying to find this huge party. It was long before the age of iPhones and GPS apps. All we had to work with was an address, and the building was no where to be found. We spent the next thirty minutes going up and down near empty streets, in semi-formal New Years party-attire. Though I was frustrated and freezing, I thought the visual of two dressed-up people, lost and roaming around the desolate and empty city streets was an interesting juxtaposition. So, in conceiving this editorial, dressing the subjects up a bit, then throwing them into a literal desert was a fun way to re-create that night.

With the most congested traffic in the country, driving around Los Angeles is long and difficult as it is. So, when you lobby a creative team to commute three hours into the desert, you better have a pretty convincing vision. Fortunately, my comrades enjoyed the idea of shooting some where else beside the default beach or park, which would be far more convenient in a coastal city. The travel time to and from the Mojave Desert was nearly triple the amount of time we actually spent shooting. But to capture images in a setting that not many would have the patience to travel to, will hopefully help to distinguish and bring a different aesthetic to this story.