At the end of last year, I travelled to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard to shoot a story that was used to illustrate the launch of the brand new XC90. My brief was to photograph four leading innovators in their respective fields, and to document a journey through this part of North America. Along the way, I shot dinosaur tracks from 190 million years ago, found just off US-5 near Holyoke, the extraordinary Salade Tea Doors in Boston, a ‘Barnstar’ (a favoured decorative emblem in this part of the world, and not, as I first assumed, some symbol of a radical political movement), designer and entrepreneur Kelly Harris Smith, architect and educator Brandon Clifford with one of his designs, fashion designer Stina Sayre at her home in Martha’s Vineyard, and artist and engineer Xin Liu, in the MIT Chapel in Boston, who invented the Orbit Weaver, a device to aid movement in zero gravity environments. In addition, I gathered images of Americana, historical, sometimes timeless, but always very American. I travelled with an art director and two writers, and took a box of cameras and lenses and a couple of lights. All very portable.
