Daphni Hilton at Elite (NY)

Amanda Chamberlain at Elite (NY)

I don’t usually do makeup, but…

I’m going through a lot of old magazines ripping out the photos I like and tossing the other 99.5% of the paper.

One thing I noticed in the stack of what I’ve kept, the models don’t look at the camera very often. I sometimes tell new models “don’t look at the camera unless you mean it.”

I look at all of these thousands of images in the magazines I’m tossing out, and I have a visceral reaction to compelling lighting, compositions, dances of color on the page. When I look at a photo in which the model is just standing there deer in headlights waiting for the shutter to click, supremely unconfident, no matter what is going on in the rest of the image, I have a strong dislike for the whole. If it is an interesting setting, I am even angry at the photographer for wasting it on an uncompelling subject.

To me, photography is only a rush when it feels challenging, and if the model just stands there looking at the lens, waiting to have their picture taken, it is uninteresting. I don’t like when they submit to the process, when they are having their picture taken rather than being interesting.

Unless you have the confidence to stare down the lens or tell a story, don’t go near it, the lens will know you are weak. The lens is predatory. To use it is always to be hunting for something. When the prey is immediately submissive, the hunt is dull.

I think the vehement defense of sampling for commercial music without paying for copyright licenses is just an excuse to be lazy from people who aren’t creative or skilled enough to spoof the sounds they want to reference.

There are demons in my head.
They swell inside my skull.
Sometimes sketching can sedate them.
Sometimes talking will drive them out.

The only way to kill the demons
is to build a cage,
Build what they look like.
Give them form
and they will bleed away
into the nest, the cage,
the mausoleum
built only for them.

Then more demons come.

A few months ago I went to the Richard Avedon fashion photography exhibit at the International Center of Photography with Freda. After going through the exhibition, we ended up in the gift shop and both bought Blackbird Fly 35mm TLR cameras. Here are some selections from my first roll.

First shot.

Freda with her TLR. Mine is red and she got the yellow one.

There is a hot shoe on the side of the camera for a flash, so I started messing around with a little Canon flash I usually attach to my G9.

My favorite coffee shop is also called Blackbird.

The NYC 2600 posse headed to dinner after the September meeting.

Murd0c and Gonzo slinging hooch.

Neo ponders.

I keep finding myself in a coffee shop at midnight or later. It is good to get out of the studio. Living in your workspace is a good thing and a bad thing. The bad part is that it’s hard to get time away from your projects. So I go to this coffee shop and have pondering time.

Usually I have a small notebook with me and scribble down notes for photos or stories or business plans. Sometimes I take a sketchbook and draw abstractly with 20 year old colored pencils. I did it with chalk for a while but that was too messy. I drink hot chocolate or hibiscus tea, sometimes a Peroni but not often.

Last night I took a stack of blank 3″x5″ note cards with me and wrote the outline for a screenplay on 35 cards. I read a history book several years ago and the story has been bouncing around in my head ever since. I’m not sure I want to do the screenplay as historical, but maybe a fantasy. Not a direct translation, but something filtered through a lot of the other concepts in my head. I don’t know when I’ll find time to write it all out though. Maybe I will stick all the cards on a bulletin board so I can keep looking at it. The great thing about note cards is that the story becomes very modular. Typing the outline on a computer or writing it out by hand tends to lock scenes into a set sequence. With note cards you can shuffle the story a lot more easily, insert bits more easily. You can really work on it in a far more non-linear way. There is a note cards function built into Celtx, but it’s just not the same.

So much going on with the online fashion magazine I’ve been editing, I don’t even have time to take pictures. In a way I’m glad because I needed to take a break and reevaluate my approach to fashion photography. I feel like a lot of what I was doing a year and a half ago was less than satisfactory for demonstrating my real intentions. I was shooting a lot of tests with available environments, when my real passion is creating total environments within an image. I want to be rendering idealized environments. THe guerilla photography thing just doesn’t do it for me. I’m thinking about building a standing set from theater flats in the middle of my studio that I can change easily, but it will mean devoting less time to modaCYCLE to get that accomplished.

My favorite modaCYCLE article so far was published last week, an interview I did via email with an artist named Ari Fish, who was a contestant on Project Runway. It’s unusual to see someone that interesting on television.

I shot this backstage with my little Canon G9 during the Milan Mens Fashion Week (Milan Moda Uomo) in January.