Your path to photography was a bit circuitous. How did you find your way? 

I wanted to do an architecture degree, but I was intimidated by the math. So, I double majored in foreign languages and economics—which turned out to be mostly math. After college, I went to work for Citibank, hated my life, and quit three months later. I went to Parsons [School of Design] in New York and studied industrial design. And then I moved to Milan. 

After I finished an internship at a big furniture firm, I couldn't find a permanent design job. I didn't want to leave the country, so I took work in a fashion photography agency owned by a former model. Her husband was an old-school, grouchy fashion photographer who took me under his wing. I basically learned the art and business of photography from them, and spent a few years assisting and slogging around giant cameras. It was a great experience, but I came to hate the fashion system. The models, even the photographers and stylists, have a shelf life of three or four years before you're just not cool anymore. 

After that I went to graduate school for design at Central St. Martin's in London. And when I finished that, I came back to the States, bought a giant yellow '73 Pontiac sight unseen in San Francisco for $900, and drove it across the country until I found a job in Virginia. All my free time from then on was spent out on the road. I was just enamored of the grit. I stayed in the worst motels imaginable, ate food off plastic plates in diners, and hunted for ruined places, especially malls. I used the crappy camera I had and really fell in love with that process. 

I realized that while I was doing my day job, the only thing that I cared about doing was just being out on the road with my camera. It was the best tool I had for deciphering the world and understanding why it was changing. I think all of the stuff that I photographed in the States was sort of a reaction to that [fashion] system I came to hate so much in Italy.   

You said earlier that photographing abandoned malls was a reaction to how the fashion industry treated people and things as disposable. Did studying economics and design also play a role?

Likely because of my economics background, in design school I became obsessed with the ways in which designed objects are consumed and metabolized.

The distinction [between lasting and disposable] is never just a question of pure worth or pure utility. A ratty but functional old Volvo is likelier to stay out of a junkyard far longer than a high-dollar exotic car that cannot be easily repaired. It's easy to understand the churn in computers but harder to swallow this logic in other areas, like furniture or watches, where even a moderately well designed and cared-for object can last decades. An Eames chair or Nelson clock are generally bought as meaningful lifetime purchases, but even a simple oak table or a quartz Timex can serve their functions indefinitely.

I was always uneasy with the way trend cycles turn perfectly useful objects into trash. The malls were this on a much larger scale, thrown away like a Zara shirt after it gets ruined in the dryer. I became obsessed with these places and drove to every dead mall I could find.

I was always less interested in [dead malls] as "ruin porn" than as giant versions of the everyday objects whose disposability bothered me so much.

I began to attempt to photograph them in ways that felt as respectful of their ruined architecture as the photography of Ezra Stoller, Wayne Thom, or Julius Shulman was of the gleaming buildings they captured when new. For me it was half architectural archeology and half reverence. I made pilgrimages to these silent places that were sometimes grander than cathedrals in the hopes of honoring, or maybe refracting, their original form.

Watching these malls die and then vanish, perhaps more than anything else, shaped the way I photograph architecture.

The architecture in the Coachella Valley is sometimes referred to as desert modernism. When you actually spent time with the buildings, did that shorthand hold up?

I think it’s a place that had opportune economic and climactic conditions for long-term preservation, and through this fluke of circumstances, a large number of good modernist buildings have survived. I’m not an architectural critic, but I wonder if "desert modernism" might be an idea that is bigger than its reality. This is not to say there are no defining or distinctive flourishes in the modernism around Palm Springs.

The first is a sort of cocooning: Kaptur Plaza, for instance, is a collection of semi-open courtyards and dark, shady passages. Most of its outward-facing windows are narrow and darkly tinted, while windows that face its inner corridors have large, floor-to-ceiling glass. It feels like a protective strategy. There is almost always shade to be found somewhere around the complex, even when the sun is directly overhead. Even in the blazing hot of summer midday there are outdoor corners that remain hospitable. Deliberate provision for some exterior shade seems to be a requisite feature.

The second is a sort of paradoxical opposite: buildings that act as display vitrines for the landscape itself. Some do a great job of showing off a stark exterior landscape from inside a climate-controlled interior through oversize plate glass windows—or mirror it back at outside viewers via reflective glass. Even those that project their interiors outward via clear glass seem to merge with the landscape at various times of day, as seen in the J.W. Robinson building, whose row of street-facing windows and zig-zag roofline mimic the golden jagged mountains nearby. 

Other than the scorching heat, did this area of the country make a lasting impression on you? In what way?

I deeply, deeply love my country. I've lived a third of my life outside the U.S., and contrary to prevailing popular opinion, this remains the single best place on earth where it is possible to build any sort of life one can dream of. I’m always in awe that New Orleans and Anchorage and Santa Fe and Detroit and Cape Cod and Los Angeles are in the same country. For nearly two decades now, I have spent all of my free time driving the highways and backroads of America, and have seen it change not subtly, but dramatically. Categorically.

American society generally seemed at its best during that narrow window of decades in which we had enough technology to live recognizably modern lives, but before we began to live our lives through screens. We remained anchored to local communities and concerns but had push-button conveniences. Old traditions and regional cultures remained intact, but we could watch films and read magazines that illuminated distant parts of the globe.

I remember the optimism, you remember the optimism. We were clearly happier in those simpler, kinder, slower, lower-tech, more naive times.

A huge reason the Coachella Valley feels so singular and wonderful is that it's the site of so many intact, quality works of architecture—both highbrow and lowbrow—from the height of a truly optimistic, forward-looking time.

There was a confidence to a society that built there. The desert was one of the last frontiers. No sane person would’ve lived there year-round a century ago. But the people of that valley and the architects they commissioned tamed its inhospitable climate and made it not only livable, but gave it swagger and style. It is wonderful to spend time in a place where you can see and touch that optimism in the flesh.

We’ve been talking about buildings and objects that last and are still meaningful after trends pass, which is something we care about at Herman Miller. When did you first come across our furniture? 

My mother is not a “design” person, but I’d say she has pretty good taste. She loves the Eameses and has always had several of their chairs of various ages hanging around her house and office. I currently have a nicely worn-in Eames molded fiberglass model that has been with me since childhood. She gifted me an Eames Hang-it-All that’s next to my front door. Her recent pride and joy is an Eames Lounge Chair bought not long ago, upholstered in a really lovely deep green leather. 

I think that always having just a few objects around that were so clearly of higher quality among a lot of mass-market junk, even though they weren’t necessarily precious, is something that had a huge impact on the way I came to understand the world. On the one hand, “fine” meant the room at that one great-grandmother’s house where everything was covered in plastic and all the good dishes live. Nobody really gets to enjoy those rooms, and the fanciness is just fake, projected pretentiousness.

On the other hand, there was a much more genuine kind of “fine” embodied by those strangely captivating Eames chairs in different shapes. As a child, I could still climb on and connect Hot Wheels tracks to them, but they were nevertheless somehow better than all the other chairs knocking around our house. And just like all of the Herman Miller chairs I’ve lived with in all the years since, Eames and otherwise, those old things took scratches with dignity, they wore from being moved and rubbed against, and they always looked better with time. They’re things you’d never, ever throw away. The idea that something beat up and old can sometimes be far better than something shiny and new runs so counter to American culture. But to me, in a designed object there’s just no higher value than that kind of enduring, unassuming quality.