I grew up in Chicago so I already knew what rocks to look under.

There’s the city people come to see, and then there’s the city that’s actually there. A bit of both felt right. Millennium Park, which is always astonishingly peaceful for being in the middle of everything. The lakefront, where Lake Michigan stretches so far it stops feeling like a lake and starts feeling much more like the shores of some great sea. The architecture I believe to be the best in the nation – making you tilt your head back whether you mean to or not

And then the real stuff. You want Chicago pizza? Don’t go where you’re expected to go. Get off the riverwalk. And forgetting deep dish or Wrigley Dogs entirely for a second – the real thing is jazz. It’s everywhere in this city, seeping down into dim basement parlors that have been open for a hundred years. Some of the oldest and boldest spots in the U.S. That’s where you go. I knew where to take people, and I took them there.

I walked twenty miles a day in Washington D.C. in hundred-degree heat with humidity that sat on you like a wet towel. No stopping to eat because I knew if I sat down I wouldn’t get back up. Just coffee, the occasional reminder to drink water before things went too hazy, and the camera.

D.C. is a different kind of city to shoot. The energy is quieter, more spread out, more deliberate. It pulled me toward museums and monuments and the weight of things that have been standing longer than most states have been recognized. Less chaos, more history. Less party, more gravitas.

It was my first time there. I remember feeling a sense of love and excitement, a fascination with the scale of it, the seriousness of it, the way it felt like a city that knew exactly what it was. I walked until my legs stopped working and then I walked some more – right into some of the best meals I’ve ever had.

Miami felt like a city that had been hosting a party for twenty years and gave up on a guest list – everyone’s invited to this perpetual motion machine.

Art galleries and pop-ups on every block, promoters music pulling you in off the street before you’d even decided to stop. I had an itinerary of things I thought I should see, but it seems everything else had other ideas. I kept abandoning it for whatever was happening right in front of me, which turned out to be the right call every time.

Every bar, restaurant, and beach attraction had its own DJ. People were drinking before noon on weekdays like it was a permanent Saturday. The nightlife didn’t wind down – it just kept going until the sun came back up and nobody seemed to notice or care. Or sleep for that matter. The colors were explosive and held on to a retro Don Johnson sensibility. The food was remarkable. The cigars were rolled right in front of you. The energy was the kind you can’t manufacture and can’t quite explain – you just try to point a camera at it before it moves on and the next thing takes its place.

San Francisco might be my favorite city to photograph whether it’s on assignment or not. Everything is primed as if there has been thoughtful process of pre-production – the staging, blocking, lighting all thought out. The fog rolls in like it’s been art directed. The neighborhoods shift so fast you can feel the visual key change as you walk through them.

I met up with old friends from college and spent days moving through parks alive with music, picnics, and the particular joy of people who take advantage of any sunny day.

Great food really. Bouncing like a pinball between North Beach and Chinatown. Pasta, pizza, cannolis and quickly shifting to satiate myself with dumplings, soup, and noodles. I could die here and be happy – just after this last Sambuca shot.

Great drinks, really. Well, the drinks were about as good as you can find most places – but what a great city to get a drink in. The telltale sounds of karaoke ringing out into the street inviting me in for a boilermaker before I go on my way.

The next block, a live band belting out my favorite songs. Oh and what’s this? The wine is made in house? Well, not in house, but it’s brought from just down the road where wine country stretches across wide swaths of the California countryside. Anyway, I guess I’ll be stopping at all of them.

I had moved to Los Angeles just before COVID shut everything down. By the time this project started, I’d been living here for nearly 18 months and had barely seen it – not really. I remember how it had felt in my several visits in years prior, but something was different.

This shoot was, in a lot of ways, my first real introduction to my own city as a resident. Everything felt fresh and a little charged. People were coming back out. The energy was cautious but hungry. I pointed the camera at all of it – the light on the buildings in the afternoon, the people remembering how to be in public, the particular feeling of a city exhaling after holding its breath for too long.

Los Angeles is endlessly photographable if you know where to stand. I was still learning where to stand. But the city was patient with me.