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

My feelings tend to imprint directly onto images. If I feel apathetic or tired, I get these:

If I feel frustrated I get this:

When I feel like being a technical photographer I get this:

When I click with the model and feel inspired by the styling I get these:

My mood and outlook directly affects what I am capturing.

“Quaint my ride.”

NY Fashion Week is fast approaching, and I know this because of all the new models in town. Yesterday I shot a test with an amazing new model, Inna, from Supreme Model Management. I did the wardrobe styling myself (with a little help from Jimmy at Trash and Vaudville on St. Mark’s Place). Hair and makeup were handled by the very talented Ana Sicat.

INNA @ Supreme

This one was shot with my Pentax K10D and a 35mm lens:

I also did a couple Polaroids with my late 1960’s-era Polaroid 440 camera on nifty Fuji 100 ISO black and white pack film.

ARTICLE

This article on Karl Lagerfeld was in the March 19Th issue of The New Yorker, and though it is quite long I really enjoyed the reading. It’s good to know that the people at the top of the fashion food chain are crazy-seeming artists just like me. I especially liked the part describing the work environment in his home and the descriptions of his diversity of interests.

This is a fantastic little slide show (with commentary) over on Slate.com.

The Decline of Fashion Photography
An argument in pictures.
By Karen Lehrman

I don’t know that what is shown is a “decline” so much as a simple progression. Fashion was never about the clothes. Stories are certainly still being told through the images. I do like the idea of going back to not allowing gratuitous text to be plastered all over the negative space in images printed in magazines. It’s usually a blank area for a reason.

I was wandering around Soho last night with my friend Echo, and we stopped outside an apparently popular nightlife corner (Spring and Renwick Streets) where there are several bars clustered together. I like watching people. How they communicate, interact, represent themselves, it’s all fascinating. I was really surprised how obviously bad most of the clubwear outfits looked. Granted, this seemed to be a college and Wall Street wannabe crowd, but you ought to be at least able to get one piece of an outfit right.

Choice questions for the girls came to mind…

• “Sweetheart, are you color blind?”
• “You’ve got money for cosmopolitans, but not a mirror?”
• “Did you loot that during a blackout?”

A few had put in some effort and they really stood out, especially when they walked to the bar across the street and nearly tripped every other step clomping along in their expensive high heels, looking more like they were wearing ski boots than anything in the range of a Jimmy Choo.

One of my first thoughts as we had approached this corner was “hey, look, cute girls hanging out on the sidewalk” (they were in line for the door), but after hanging around for a few minutes my somewhat jaded fashion photographer sensibilities kicked in full force and all I saw was sad confused people.

I shot a test with a fantastic new model last week, Cristina from Supreme. I did the wardrobe styling myself, with a little help from the model. The hair and makeup were done by Mark Weiss.