My favorite scout of Washington D.C. was for a W Magazine fashion editorial by Juergen Teller. I started out scouting the ‘wrong side of the tracks,’ such as the D.C. garbage dump and nighttime parks where people might have illicit sex. As often happens, the brief eventually became more conventional, focusing on monuments and government buildings. But along the way there was excitement, such as when I was surrounded by 4 black suited guards packing 9mm pistols, who without identifying themselves demanded my camera and deleted all the photos I had taken of an interesting Brutalist concrete building that was apparently the Department of Energy. The guards got their comeuppance later that day, but that’s a much longer story. The piece was styled by Camilla Nickerson.
