© victor m maldonado

I’ve been shooting Heather since 1991, she was one of the first models I met when I temporarily moved from Los Angeles to Northern California. When Heather and I work together the shoots seem to develop an “Alice In Wonderland” quality. One day during a shoot, a group of models & I had been threatened with arrest (again) by the local law enforcement for trespassing at a favorite location — which happened to be one of the first train depots in the state of California. (Which, by the way, does not exist anymore — sacrificed to make way for yet another mall.) Heather had been pestering me all afternoon to shoot her in her new checkered coat. So after being run off from our first location we packed up the camera equipment, the models gathered their clothes, & we headed to another spot. We were losing light fast so we went to a standby location to catch the last rays of the setting sun. This place had huge, beautiful marble columns and stairs that we often used as backdrops, but this time we had to explore the upper levels since they were the only areas that still had sunlight shining on them. Once at the top, we noticed the wonderfully sunlit checkerboard tiled floor. Heather, the other models and I looked at each other with a single thought, Wow, grab that coat!

The film I used for this shot is Kodak TMAX3200 pushed to 6400

— victor m maldonado