Client: Esentai Luxury Centre Agency: McCann Location: Almaty, Kazakhstan

McCann commissioned me to travel and photograph the launch campaign of Esentai Tower and Mall in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The campaign ran across the country and Central Asia with one of the photographs eventually covering roughly 2,000 square metres of the tower's glass façade.

I knew little about Kazakhstan when the assignment came in, but the scale of the project was clear. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Esentai Centre combines a 168-metre tower with offices, residences and a luxury shopping experience. Saks Fifth Avenue was opening its first store in Central Asia, joined by Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Loro Piana and other international fashion houses along with the Ritz-Carlton Almaty hotel. Kazakhstan's oil, gas and mineral wealth had brought considerable investment into Almaty, and Esentai was one of its most conspicuous expressions: international architecture, property and luxury retail assembled into a new commercial centre beneath the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains.

I spent a week in and around Almaty working with the super McCann Kazakhstan team to produce the campaign. The assignment gave me an immediate way into a city I had never seen and knew almost nothing about. We worked together through the production and, when we weren't shooting, the team became my hosts, taking me around Almaty, introducing me to people and showing me parts of the city that had nothing to do with Esentai or the campaign. Almaty had ceased to be Kazakhstan's capital in 1997 but remains its largest city and commercial and cultural centre. The new towers, international fashion houses and money surrounding Esentai existed alongside the Soviet city and a much longer Central Asian history. I had arrived to photograph one very particular expression of Kazakhstan and was fortunate enough to see something beyond it.

The campaign ran throughout Kazakhstan, but its largest application was Esentai Tower itself. One of my images was reproduced as a monumental installation across the tower's glass façade, approximately 2,000 square metres. What had begun as a photograph made during a commercial production was now several dozen storeys above the street, illuminated at night and visible across Almaty. At that scale the image stopped behaving like a conventional advertisement; from a distance, it became part of the building.

The tower is the obvious image from which to remember the assignment, but the week around it matters just as much to me. I went to Kazakhstan because the work took me there, but the people I worked with made a point of showing me where they lived rather than simply moving me between a hotel and a set. Assignments that put me somewhere unfamiliar have always interested me for precisely that reason. I arrive with a job to do, but without all the usual reference points and habits. Almaty was one of those: a large commercial production in a place I knew almost nothing about and left with a new understanding of its people and culture.