Last February, after traveling from his home in New Hampshire to attend a photo show in Anaheim, CA, David Mendelsohn met up with his son, Christian, who drove down from Monterey, and the two embarked on a three-day road trip through the desert lands east of Los Angeles. The idea, David says, was to simply "drive, hang out, camp out, see things and photograph them."

When we heard about the road trip, we wanted to see the photos. You see, our familiarity with David's work—be it commercial, advertising, editorial or fine art—led us to believe that the desert wouldn't be the most fertile place for his photography. David deals in bright colors, bold graphics, unusual juxtapositions and, often, just plain bizarre stuff—elegantly photographed, to be sure, but bizarre nonetheless; stuff like armchairs swallowing up people, irons flying through the air, legs in all sorts of unlikely places and hatboxes on peoples' heads. We didn't think the desert would be...well, let's say inspirational enough.

Just shows how wrong you can be.

"A different palette" David concedes, saying that the places they visited, which included Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree National Park, Anza Borrego and the Salton Sea, necessitated a few minor adjustments but no major changes to his imaging approach. 

For example, he remained a drive-by shooter. "Doesn't matter where I am, I'll be driving and see something and turn around and go back to shoot," David says. "We did that a lot, and while we were finding a way back to what I'd seen, I'd see other photographs."

And so a colorful water tank was spotted in a desert town near the Salton Sea. "What's interesting," David says, "is that prior to the trip I'd started on a series of tank photographs. So there we are in the middle of nowhere, and there's this tank. It was surrounded by a chain link fence, but right away two people from the municipal water department pulled up, and they gave me permission to go in and take photographs."

And a vintage crop duster, now used to tow gliders, was spotted as father and son drove in Warner Springs. "The most important thing here," David says, "was the little arc of clouds."

We might add David's choice of angle was also a key factor.

One of our favorite images is the abandoned gas station. First noticed in daylight, David left the hotel where he and Christian were staying to photograph it at three o'clock in the morning. He added to the light coming from the hotel and a nearby convenience store by light-painting with a rechargeable auto light that he bought in California, just in case a light-painting opportunity presented itself.