The subtitle here should be PORTRAITS 1.
I rarely aim to shoot portraits. It’s a particular of photography that requires either a lot of time and a lot of equipment; or better yet, a lot of both. Good photos of people come when they are not assuming. Most of the commercial photographers I know tend to shoot countless images waiting for their subjects to relax into boredom, for camera’s presence to dissipate. Eventually the gems they are mining for surface in later shots. The few exceptions to this who I can think of are of another generation—photographers without digital options, unable to blow funds on a ton of frames unlikely to be used. I’ve been told that props, mindless conversation, and straight up stalling came into play to get the results they were looking for in those times. Essentially though, the idea is the same.
Me though? I’m broke, man. Perpetually. And to boot, I’m cursed with haphazard mind that doesn’t allow me to keep things. What I’m saying is, is that I break cameras all the time. But since I consider my photo work more of a collection than a craft, I’m fine without sweating a Carl Zeiss lens, a light meter, or any of the other goodies that I could probably use to elevate my work. I mean, that would truly make it *work,* and I have a hard enough time remembering that I started doing this as a teenager who was only trying to have some fun. So y’see, material conditions and personal philosophy don’t really make me a portrait guy. But! By virtue of both longevity and a lot of dusty thrift store point-n-shoots though, I have in fact made a lot of portraits.
Now originally I was going to play a game of scrambled eggs with this whole series of installments, largely letting the chips land where they may until it was done, but the thing is that it’s got a long fukkin way to go until it’s done if I’m sticking to this groups of seven images format that I’ve chosen. Since that’s the case, why not mix it up a little by not mixing it up, so to speak? How about a theme for once? I remember something Ray Potes said, (I think in the documentary that we worked on?) that the first issue of Hamburger Eyes that really took off was the one that was full of portraits. And ya know, I get it. There’s a lot going on with portraits. And mining mine gives me an excuse to write a little about all these interesting people I’ve met over the years; maybe even to abstract the idea a little. Here we go.
Marisol is called Partysol and is an SF native who likes to party. Or at least she did. I think concerns for health and sanity made her stop partying in the way that she used to when I snapped this. If I remember right, this was taken outside an art show that had attracted a lot of graffiti bros. Maybe Mike Giant was exhibiting. That sounds right. When an oafish fight broke out amongst the bros I started trying to take pictures of them looking foolish and a couple started coming for me, one winging a bottle just past my ear. In my retreat, Marisol pulled me into her car along with some other folks who’d already packed in. I remember laying across laps in the back while Mari rambled cocainedly about how she didn’t need to slow down through The Panhandle because she knew exactly when every light would turn green, that her speed was synched up precisely. I don’t know how fast we were going down Fell street, but it wasn’t slow. Thankfully by either coincidence or province she was right and we didn’t run a single red, the stops ticking to gos just at the moment we leapt into each intersection. I see her when I pass through The City now, if I can, and when I bring up old times like this she says, “Oh yeah, we were partying.”
I lived with this guy Adam for a couple of years in a big warehouse out in The Bayview district and—if it means anything to you, it was the one that used to host the Monkeybrains<dot>net ISP back in the 90s; an early kind of tech collective that was sincere in its progressive attitudes, and approached the new information epoch with the kind of optimistic freak energy that’s tough to track down in such circles nowadays—Adam crashed his bike. He was a messenger back then, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him or anyone in his industry to take such a spill. If I remember right, someone opened their car door on him as he was passing in a bike lane downtown. As far as the photo goes, this was a lucky shot. I’d only intended to snap Adam and his reflection, and didn’t anticipate the flash to create a shadow looking back at him as he surveyed his own mangled face. If you’ve ever had even a mildly serious head injury then you know there comes a certain out-of-body feeling that lifts you from yourself, as if your spirit is spectating on your body in some somnambulist state. I think that is captured nicely here. Adam lives in Korea with his wife now. We remain good friends.
While I was in Japan Mike fell off a cliff in the Utah bush, fracturing his skull and spine a bunch. He was alone when it happened, though luckily he was found by people with medical training who quickly stabilized him. Search and rescue made it to their position and evacuated him in time for him to receive the treatment that would help him (mostly) recover. A brain injury caused by blunt cerebral trauma made him forget why he was up on a cliff in the first place, but Mike is moody and reckless so it feels less like a mystery and more like something that would probably happen to a guy like that. Among other things he can’t remember is how he came into the possession of a Jenna Jameson branded blow-up doll, or why he brought it to my apartment when he came to stay with me in New Orleans for a month or two. He was writing for VICE at the time, covering the climate of the 2012 election run-up in bars around the city, while I shot photos and helped him edit his pieces. It was a fun time, with lots of late nights working and bullshitting over free drinks and political gab. If he hadn’t kept having seizures due to all the unfinished cranial mapping that still needed to be done post accident, he probably could have stuck around and we would have made a longer term team of things. Things being what they were though, when I found him alone, all tensing muscles and kicking feet, on a floor in a hallway of the old silo I had an art studio in at the time, my friends and I elected he be sent home to receive more treatment. A couple of years later I would drive to see him in Salt Lake City and reunite him with the doll that he’d let deflate into a vinyl puddle on my apartment floor.
To some imaginary judge I am not sure if I can officially qualify this as a portrait. Maybe it is a “nightlife photograph.” It captures a loose and carefree angle of the two in the picture that I’d like to remember as representations of their characters however, and that’s enough for me. On the right is Aubrey Edwards; photographer, activist, educator, and real-life Looney Tune whose causal encouragement and advice had some significant impacts on my life. On the left is Anthony Paul, Sr. A man known as the Governor of the block on the one-thousand block of Piety Street in New Orleans’ Bywater—the kind of guy who’d bring your trashcans out to the curb for you on trash day if he noticed you forgot. As I knew him he was kind and fun and funny; then murdered two short years after this picture was taken. In the moment, we were drunk, at Yuri Herrera’s house, following a reading of his then yet to be translated title, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo. When the book later won the national Best Translated Book Award (2016), Herrera donated the prize money to the Paul’s widow. Privately I have long considered the intentional killing of a man who was considered to “govern piety” a strange symbol of an emotional sea change that took place, seemingly globally, in that same fateful year.
I’ve seen a meme floating out in the internet ether that lists “male canon events.” Virginity loss, first buzzcut, etc. The one I find particularly funny is something along the lines of “self sabotage the love of your life.” I wouldn’t exactly call Keiko the love of my life, but my relationship with her was the first that was on me for ruining, and it took me a long time to stop regretting it. I took a lot of photos of her through our ups and downs together, but this one, in some alleyway in Tokyo, is probably my favorite. We’re still in touch. She lives in England these days.
Apart from a great Elvis impersonation, waving a loaded derringer in my face, and his claim that Coca-Cola makes him “hornier than a three pecker’d billy goat,” it’s hard to know what to say about my encounter with Paul MacLeod. Certainly there’s plenty of folks out there who’d say more. He created and lived in Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Roughly a year after I took this picture he shot and killed an alleged home invader, possibly with the same gun he’d brandished before me. He died himself about a day after the incident, his corpse found reclining in a rocking chair on his porch, emblazoned with The King’s acronym, TCB.
I took this self portrait on the precipice of a high road in the Angeles National Forest on my way to Lancaster, CA, a dismal, burnt out cranny of my beloved home state. In hindsight, it’s a shock my truck made it all the way there and back with no issues—those came later though. I’d pulled over to capture the panorama of the city below me, but the glaring light, reflections, and portals I saw upon reentering the pickup prompted me to snap this real quick too. I look at it and see a headache. Another picture I think is more emblematic of a mental state than than of the person in it… Then again though, I’m not sure my mental state has changed much either before or since this was taken, so I guess that’s me alright.
