These past couple of years have been a huge transformation in the way we go about our daily lives. It was not until recently that many of us started to get used to what was once familiar. This trip to Los Angeles was the studio’s first project abroad since the pandemic and it felt as if we were put in place to learn something new again—adjusting ourselves to this “post-pandemic” life.
While being at an airport can come with some uncertainty nowadays, there is also this sense of comfort when seeing people go about their lives in typical airport fashion. Some reading books, others propping their legs up on their luggages and listening to music with their neck pillow tightly wrapped.
I haven’t been back to LA since I was a teenager. Arriving for the first time as an adult, I felt myself going in with a different perspective, welcoming the idea that I was visiting this city with fresh eyes. We arrived in the late afternoon and went into our rented vehicle, anticipating heavy traffic along the way to our next destination. While we didn’t have much opportunity to casually wander, we were able to grab ourselves hōjicha lattes and take them along with us to the Art District.
The next morning, we met with our LA-based friends and creative team, Ja Tecson (photographer) and Rosanna Peng (director), at a little coffee shop near Playa Del Rey Beach. We were actually considering this place as a potential area to shoot, so we scouted the area during our visit. It’s a beautifully calm location with sand to road parking, soft ocean waves, and bird footprints on the freshly swept sand.
For this trip, we were on assignment to shoot the LOJEL 2022 campaign, with an aim to capture this aspect of “moving to connect”—how we commute and travel everyday to make connections. We wanted to showcase the importance of community within a city, and thought LA was the perfect location for this, considering it has so much to offer.
