Santa Monica Place for WSJ

My friend Matt Slaby looks at every chance to photograph as an opportunity to escape, a chance for meditation. This idea is interesting in that it is both a refreshing way to approach photography and a thoughtful exercise. For me, it is a reminder of that feeling when I first fell in love with photography over and over again. It also gives me structure to focus my energies on what is important: trying to make images that simultaneously make you think and feel.

Last week I shot the final stages of the remodeling of Santa Monica Place, one of several malls owned by the property development company, Macerich. Having an aversion to malls in general, this might normally have been an unpleasant assignment. But to the contrary it was a lot of fun. There was so much to see – the swarm of activity, the myriad of layers in the reflections of glass, the swirling shapes, and the bright colors of the workers set apart from the subdued hues of the construction. Macerich basically took the roof off of the mall and made it an open courtyard, which seems to be a new trend in malls here in California. The only down side was that I only had about an hour to shoot – I could have spent all day.