I’m very happy to announce the launch of something I’ve been working towards for awhile, with my friend and Director of Operations @la_centerofphoto, Brandon Gannon. I will be hosting a recurring portrait salon, where members of @la_centerofphoto will be welcome to show and discuss their work, and I will give support, instruction, and hopefully lots of inspiration. After 40 years of photographing portraits, I have a lot to share, and I’d be very happy to share it with you! Their annual membership is a modest $140 a year and it welcomes you into a great community with classes, workshops, a print lab and a full annual calendar of events. First salon is October 28th at 7pm. I hope to see you there!
My ‘Art of the Empathetic Portrait’ is confirmed for @santafeworkshops beginning October 10th, on line, once a week for 5 sessions. There are still two places available, so please think about joining us if you’re interested in deepening your work in portraiture, and, in my experience, your experience of life!
Teaching is very much on my mind these days. I’ve just returned from Cleveland where I spent two days co-teaching a self portrait and art making workshop to a group of incredible cancer patients, with my friend, Dr Tim Gilligan. We hope to have a short film of that event soon. It’s surely one of the most profound things I’ve ever been part of, and I can’t wait to share more about it with you. I have a couple of other workshops in the making that I will also announce soon.
For now, as I think about what I have to say about photography and portraiture, I thought I’d start to share some of my favorite images of my own. Looking back on all the work I’ve done, it’s been an incredible journey from light to shadow and back, over and over. For many years I was known as a good guy to get for beautiful women portrait in magazines, but I’ve done just as many photojournalism pieces that took me to darker places. I’ve decided not to overthink this, but just dip into my archive, see what catches my eye and then write something about why.
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I’m so excited to be back on-line with my dear friends @santafeworkshops, teaching The Art of the Empathetic Portrait again. If you’d care to join us, we will go wide and deep together. I hope to see you there! ❤️
Ps; Vale, the great Glen Hansard.
I just posted a new entry on my Substack (presently for free, friends!) Have a look if you’re a music lover (aren’t we all?) 🔗 in bio, think of it as elevated, guilt free scrolling
Very early on the morning of my birthday a couple of weeks ago, a not inconsequential one, a between decades one, I walked into Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Santa Cruz all alone. For a while I’d been wanting to be somewhere there wasn’t a sight or sound of anything but nature. I got close, there was a well-trod trail, but only the sound of the occasional dropping branch and the birds, warning each other about me.
I’ve been a photographer, from my first job in a black and white darkroom until now for 40 years. I’m always up for another assignment, for all this time they’ve been a sort of narcotic for me, the thrill of going somewhere I’ve never been and photographing someone I’ve never met before. But we can all agree the world has changed so much and our industry along with it. I love to work, I love to take photographs of people, I love to share what I know. I’ve been doing that for the last 18 years, somewhat haphazardly upon request for Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles Center for Photography, and the wonderful place that has given me a home as a teacher, Santa Fe Workshops.
In light of all this, loving new beginnings and believing in ritual and ceremony I told this tree I was going to go all in with teaching going forward. The tree said nothing, I was completely within it, it had survived fires and was said to be between 1400 and 1800 years old, and around 270 feet tall. I was like Chow Mo-wan (played by Tony Leung) in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, who whispers his unspoken secret into a crack in the ancient stone ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, before sealing the crevice with mud and grass. I’m sealing it by posting it on Instagram. Not nearly so romantic, but I trust you with the information.
This July 4th, I’m thinking about that potent symbol of America: its Stars and Stripes. It’s hard to describe the impression the American flag made on this newly arrived immigrant kid in 1986, seeing it flying up and down Fifth Avenue in New York City and feeling, somehow, that I’d come home.
Growing up in Australia—with our own very good flag, (though do we still need the Union Jack taking up a quarter of it?), the American flag belonged to the movies and television shows that formed so much of my imagination. There’s a wonderful line in Wim Wenders’ 1976 film Kings of the Road: “The Yankees have colonized our subconscious.” They certainly had mine. Through Hogan’s Heroes, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, and every great summer movie of the 1970s, draped over JFK’s coffin, stitched onto astronauts’ spacesuits, Mark Spitz’s Speedos, America lived in me long before I ever set foot here.
So here we are, 250 years later, and not entirely—or even mostly—for the better. This is a part of a short film I shot some years ago as a meditation on America’s beautiful flag, and also on the people it had left behind. Thom Yorke’s plaintive voice says it all. There are more of these people than ever now. They won’t be at pool parties or barbecues today. Please spare them a thought.
And may this country I believe in survive these days, and be again what it still might be.
SOUTH ON FIVE
Like a map, everything is connected if you only look.
Hi friends, I just posted on my Substack, Light Years. Something about road trips, highway weirdness and accidents, and the connections that thread through our lives. I have it linked in my bio❤️
Please check it out if this sounds of interest!
How did you do it, Mum?! Bring up 5 kids and welcome every friend we ever had into the wonderful home you and Dad made for us. I wish I could hug you and tell you how much I love you, and how grateful I am. But you always loved a good ghost story, so I think you know! Miss you every day! ❤️xo
To a legendary mom on this Mother’s Day! Thank you for loving us Tracy, and making our lives together so great. We love you!
❤️😘🥰!!!
This is one of my favorite portraits ever, Jodi Foster, at Smashbox Studios, assigned by the great @kathleenclarkphoto at Los Angeles Magazine. I knew I had the cover already and the inside image of Jodi with one of her closest collaborators, her script supervisor, Diane Dreyer (see following images). Sometimes on shoots if there’s time, I’ll grab some 4 x 5 images for myself. My camera is an old Crown Graphic that I have on a tripod, it’s all a bit rickety, but somehow the edge of disaster has often been where my best images have been found, a dangerously slow shutter speeds, in fluky flight. Occasionally, these kind of images have been published and sometimes not, but maybe because of that, I feel like I can be a little bit more rough and ready. This is Jodi on the floor, just inside the open garage doors at Smashbox in daylight only. By the look of her eyes, I’m bouncing some silver cards and white fill in there as well. It’s a far from perfect photo, I managed to amputate a couple of her fingers by not noticing how her hand was, it’s not perfectly sharp. But because of the actress she is, someone that has been in front of the camera’s lens since she was 5 years old, I’ve never photographed anyone that was so completely available to the process, and so completely present. To look through the lens at her was something I’ll never forget.
If you’re interested in how these kinds of images happen, I have workshops coming up for @la_centerofphoto and @santafeworkshops. Please have a look at the links in my bio.
A small, good thing.
I’ve just finished a year of volunteering, every Tuesday morning at the LA downtown library, teaching English conversation as part of their Literacy program. Mostly we used the Oxford Picture Dictionary, though that often led to discussions about words and their meanings. It’s amazing how far the conversation would travel. Sometimes, yesterday, communicating as best we could, we talked about the last time we were really happy, ate donuts I’d brought from the 7-Eleven, drank sparking apple juice and laughed together.
I’m going to take a break from it and get into other things I need to, but I will really miss my group. Regulars who show up every week, Emiko and Pedro, others I saw a lot, others just once or a few times. It was my own, small act of solidarity with the kind of people the Trump administration has done so much to threaten and expel. But in that room in the Literacy Center we didn’t talk much about that, I only saw good, hard working people who were not asking for special favor. They were bravely doing their best to improve their lives and their language in a place where they would love to stay.
Special thanks to my friend Cyn Solloa who does so much to make the Adult Literacy program happen @lapubliclibrary ❤️
