I photographed Margaux this past summer while I was in Paris. She was working at Claudie Pierlot, where I had just purchased a pair of black ankle boots that I now wear pretty much every day. She said that she was working at the store to finance a trip to Australia. When I asked her, “Why Australia?” she said, “I’ve always wanted to go to the end of the world, and you can’t go much farther than that.”
Boom!
I won’t lie: I’m not a traveler. I didn’t do the whole backpacking across Europe staying at youth hostels thing, although I have been to Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Romania. I know that last one seems random, but I’m half Romanian. When I was in high school, my mother was trying to build an investment bank in Bucharest (yes, she’s the Romanian in the situation), so we spent two weeks at Christmastime one year. I was a teenager and not that psyched to be trapped in a weird country with my family for that long. Now I would love to go back and photograph the hell out of the place.
Six years ago I had an opportunity to go to Vietnam, but ultimately it didn’t pan out. That was a bummer. I have romantic notions of riding a bicycle through the streets of Hanoi, speaking French and drinking iced coffee with condensed milk. And if I were already in that part of the world, I’d definitely make a trip to Cambodia, which I’ve been vaguely obsessed with since seeing The Killing Fields in high school. In fact, my interest in that part of the globe stems in large part from violent movies about the war there: Platoon, Good Morning Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket. Should I be worried about that?
The above may be a rhetorical question, but feel free to answer it anyway. Or take a crack at this one: What places are you dying to visit and why?
