I thought about writing this post last month but with my trip to Australia and all of the holiday madness I never quite got around to it. But now with the New Year my blog posting motivation has been reinvigorated and I am ready to tell the tale of my shoot with Fran Leibowitz! If you haven’t seen the HBO documentary “Public Speaking” of the New York Icon you really should try. Considering the film consists mainly of Fran talking, it’s amazingly entertaining, (and beautifully directed by Martin Scorsese.) The reason? Because Fran is a brilliant satirist who is incredibly opinionated, has an acerbic wit and seems to know everything about everything. Anyway, she arrived at my studio alone and on time for our BUST magazine shoot and we had a lovely time gabbing about everything under the sun. (We talked about the Chilean Miners, how horrible Times Square is now, how amazing technology is these days etc…) She was friendly and funny and I would venture to guess, a great guest at a dinner party. After several hours of chatting and snapping, I can say that the shoot went quite smoothly. My favorite quote from Fran was “The worst photo taken of you in your 20’s is better than the best photo taken of you in your 50’s!”. Plus as an added benefit, we got invited to the incredibly glamorous premiere of “Public Speaking” at the MOMA, and the after party at the Four Seasons. Let me tell you, it seems no one mentioned to the folks at HBO that times were tough, because that was the fanciest spread of food I have ever seen. There were several “all you could eat” seafood bars stocked with lobster and crab meat and table after table of food each representing a different cuisine. The PDN party would have done well with the scraps.
I found these beautiful old Wurts Bros photographs of New York City street scenes on the Museum of the City of New York website this weekend and they stirred up my feelings for how powerful the endless march of time is, trudging forward, wiping out everything in its path. 100 years go by and nothing is the same. I love the new year, its a wonderful time to reflect on the happenings of the past and realign for a fresh new start. Last year was challenging to say the least. I struggled with my disillusionment with the photography business and the truly unpleasant aspects of digital file management. I long for the days went I could just throw my negs into folder and put them in a drawer. But on the other hand I was exhilarated by the DSLR revolution and the prospect of telling stories through video. With a grand effort by many I was able to execute the making of my short film Swandive, which I am now entering into festivals. (hopefully we will get into one or two!) One of the more exciting events of the year for me was signing with AndersonHopkins. Now I that have an agent again and I feel like my work is getting out there in front of the advertising world again! I was greatly inspired by Filmmaker Magazine Scott Macaulay’s Resolution list but I can encapsulate my plans for the new year into one simple word: FOCUS
Upside down and backwards, I’m home from 9 days in Australia where we shot the image campaign for the new Spielberg produced FOX show Terra Nova. The premise for this new Sci-Fi pilot: it’s 2149, the world is dying and a group of volunteers are sent back to the prehistoric age to attempt to preserve the human race. Land of the Lost meets Jurassic Park! Being a 20 million dollar production, my guess is that it’s going to be pretty cool. Besides vampires are so passé these days, I need some T-Rex action!
The flight down was not bad considering it was 14 hours (not including the JFK-LAX warm up). It helped that we mysteriously got bumped to premium. I cried watching “the Kids are alright” and I fell head first into Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (I swear it’s the best book I’ve ever read!) all while reclining in a cocoon like dome.
The show is being filmed on a lush mountain hillside an hour south of Brisbane Australia but we stayed in the ugly and inappropriately named town Surfers Paradise. They put us up at the glass tower Q1 which is a not a hotel but a residential apartment building with no service. Its claim to fame is that it’s the 28th tallest structure in the world but I think it might fair even better on a list of the most hideous monstrosities in the world. Officially known as “Schoolie’s Week” the town was over run with thousands of drunken teenagers looking to get laid. All the boys with their frosted tip swoosh hairdos chasing after the pretty girls with their little bird faces. Think ft Lauderdale, spring break 1994.
It’s supposed to be summer here but unusually weird weather patterns have brought rain for weeks on end and the production is scrambling to adjust. The set of Terra Nova is a whole town of buildings and structures sinking in a puddle of mud. Working with the FOX Creative team, the lovely Diane Cooper and the funniest art director in the land Michael Vamosy, we spent our first two days acclimating to the environment and scouting the compound, sussing out the power and the crew and the myriad details involved in the production. We had a huge shoot planned, multiple group shots with nine cast members, all around the set. Next to the singsong of the aussy, our clunky American accent sounded so ugly, and even though we were all speaking English, communication was surprisingly difficult. Most of the local crew terminology was undecipherable so getting things worked out was a bit more complicated than we were expecting.
Anyway, with the sogginess setting in, the set was covered in mud and the forecast was looking grim. We had planned on shooting at the studio on Saturday and at Terra Nova on Sunday but at the last minute we decided to gamble and switch our days around hoping to get less rain on Saturday than Sunday. Mother nature had a 38 and we were dancing.
For the last several months I have been working on a short film titled SWAN DIVE and even though we are not finished yet I do have a few stills to share. SWAN DIVE is a dark tale I wrote about a troubled man who is pushed over the edge by a psychic’s curse. The film stars Mario Rivera as Bryan and Liz Elkins as Renata, with a cameo from Tunde Adebimpe as Dante. Mott Hupfel was director of photography, Alice Wang produced, Nick Zinner is writing the score, Melissa Hufcut-Roth is editing and lots other of great people have helped me to get this done and I cannot thank them enough! I made this film because i felt like it, I wanted to spice things up a little around here. Don’t get me wrong, I still love still photography, but I’ve been taking photographs for 30 years now and I find the complexities of filmmaking to be fascinating and challenging. Getting to this point was more difficult than I imagined. When the 5d came out a couple of years ago, I was blown away by the beautiful imagery of the video, but when I tried to make a video myself I realized i knew very little about the process, so I decided to learn. I shot a bunch of little profiles and interviews and learned to edit Final Cut Pro. I took a bunch of workshops, including the amazing “Story” screenwriting workshop with Robert Mckee and I studied acting at Stella Adler for 6 months. But the only way to really learn is to actually make something. Hence Swan Dive! We are scrambling to meet the deadline for the SXSW film festival next month. Wish me luck!
In August I spent 2 weeks in Memphis on the set of the independent feature “Losers Take All”, an 80′s Rock and Roll comedy about a DIY punk band looking to make some noise. How I ended up there is kind of a long story but in a nutshell, I was invited by the producer Mike Ryan to come hang out and “learn how its done”. I arrived on day 3 of a 20 day schedule and was welcomed with open arms by the producers Andrew Pope and Winn Coslick, the director Alex Steyermark, the cast (who I fell in love with) and the crew. And of course Mike Ryan. He is a veteran indie film producer with endless knowledge of the process and a heart of gold, never tiring from giving in-depth explanations to any questions I could come up with. My head was like a giant sponge, absorbing as much info as I possibly could take in. The Filmmaking process is similar to still photography in many ways, most notably in the composition of the frame, but the differences are vast, the storytelling techniques so much more intricate, the language of acting so foreign, in the end its hard to compare the two, like apples and oranges. Photography is like checkers and filmmaking is like chess, exponentially more complicated. Anyway, my time in Memphis was priceless, I was involved in all aspects of the production, bouncing from the camera dept and the grip and electric, to the art department and to the wardrobe, to hanging with the actors, to sitting in on producer meetings, and most importantly watching the director Alex make a thousand decisions a minute. Even though it was 100 degrees in the shade and we were all melting, Everyone was so awesome. Being on the set made me realize what a lonely job photography is. You get an assignment, you work with someone for an hour, maybe if you are lucky you get to spend a day getting to know them then you never see them again. On the LOSERS set, the work was grueling (I ended up shooting a lot of the on set unit coverage), the hours were long and you really had time to get to know people. It was heartbreaking to leave. I cant wait for the premiere!
Back in the old days, I would shoot several album covers a month, but nowadays I get about one or two a year. Album packaging used to be a job requiring professionals, but the last time I was up at Universal my art director friend was comping up a cover from a iphone Hipstamatic file. I still love to be involved with Album art. Unlike magazine work, which is fleeting and lasts a month, an album cover is on the stands FOREVER! Anyway, working with David Sitek from TV on the Radio is such a blast! The guy is teeming with energy, super talented and just plain inspiring to hang out with! We shot the cover image in front of a weird looking painted mural of a tree that we had scouted in Burbank, but of course the legal department at Interscope shot it down and they ended up digitally removing it. We totally gorilla-ed the shot in the field with the record execs shooting at Dave. Thank god the legal department weren’t there for that.
After a long run of special issues for People Magazine, including Miley, Jonas, and High School Musical to name a few, the economy crashed and the whole thing came to a screeching halt. But when I got the call from photo editor Jessica Bryan asking my availability to shoot the cast of GLEE, I started kissing the phone. (not really) Anyway, after several trips up to the Time Life Building and a lot of help from producer Molly Murray and all our friends at FOX, we were able to orchestrate a full cast photo shoot, integrated into a absolutely huge production for FOX On Air and Publicity. That’s 14 cast members being shot an 7 different sound stages simultaneously. I was on stage one and was allotted 20 minutes with each cast member. The shoot went surprisingly smoothly and everyone was as charming and as wonderful as you would hope. Then the fun began. The compositing and the retouching and all of the post production on this was bananas, and to make matters worse, the deadline was imminent. I was up until 3am every night for a week!
Its the dog days of summer and after 3 trips to LA, including shoots with the cast of GLEE, the Cast of Human Target, Joan Rivers, and 10 days in Memphis on an independent feature, this week I am taking it easy and doing some work around the house. But considering all the effort I’ve been putting into working on film and video I thought it would be nice to end the summer with a short film that I shot last fall and have never posted. I didn’t write it or secure the rights to the music or anything like that because it was just a test, but I think it came out pretty nice. Its 11 minutes long so pull up a chair.
“It’s not going to work!” Thats the first thing David Blaine said to me when he walked into the studio. After explaining our plan and showing him how prepared we were, he then proclaimed that it would take 5 tries to get it right. Let’s just say that David has a “strong personality” and I had to use every trick in the photographic Jujitsu playbook to make it through the day. It’s incredibly physically demanding to hang upside down and I do have to give it to David for delivering a command performance. He did end up inverting 5 times but we actually got the winning shot on the 3rd time upside down. The whole team did a great job, including photo editor Alison Unterreiner, set builder Jesse Nemeth and you can see stylist Wendell T Brown in the BTS photo below. Of course the shoot wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Michael Norseng’s brilliant concept! After the shoot David gathered the crew around and performed some of the most amazing card tricks I have ever seen. Literally cards disappeared right in front of my eyes. That was some serious Magic!
Sometimes I forget to take advantage of the benefits of living in New York and all of the world class art exhibits that the city has to offer. Fortunately I was able to catch the Henry Cartier-Bresson show at the MOMA on the last day of the show, because if I would have missed it, I don’t think I could have forgiven myself. Normally I hate fighting the crowds but I have to say that it was thrilling to see so many people there enjoying the show and really validating photography as an artform. Bresson is a master and a hero of mine and influenced me greatly during my formative years. That said, I was actually kind of disappointed with the curation of the show. I understand that they were trying to express the broad depth of his work, but I feel like there was a lack of rigorous editing and organization of the images. Too much redundancy within the compositions and too all over the place regarding chronology. Anyway, who am I to complain? I felt honored to see the show. As we were leaving we happened upon the exhibit Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography and after the overwhelmingly dense Bresson show this was breath of fresh air. What an amazing group of photographs made by women, many of them I had never even heard of. Don’t miss it!
Ten years ago I shot the cast of Malcolm In The Middle and my most vivid memory of the shoot was how hilarious the dad was to work with. When I was asked to shoot Bryan Cranston for NYM at first I didnt recognize the name but after a checking on IMDB I soon realized that the crazy meth dealer on Breaking Bad was also Malcolm’s dad! Fortunately Bryan was still crazy after all those years and the shoot was a blast. We even had time to make a quick mock book cover that Bryan took onto the DAILY SHOW with Jon Stewart. The video that we made came on the heels of the photoshoot and I will be the first to admit that its a challenge to do both photo and video at the same time, but I think it came out alright. Thank you Bryan Cranston!!!
In February I went to Dallas and shot the Ad campaign for the Fox show THE GOOD GUYS. These gallery sessions are incredibly difficult and complex but hands down, they are the funnest jobs to shoot! The logistics for the shoot involved working around the TV crew’s schedule, setting up several giant sets at once in an empty warehouse, including a 40ft white background for 2 cars at once, lighting several group shots in a different location, almost getting our generator shut down by the City and dealing with the intricacies of armadillo wrangling. Its a huge machine, with 3 different video crews following all of us around, oh and did I mention having the actual Highway Patrol escort us around town while we shot plates of the Dallas skyline? All the actors were fantastic, I was impressed with Colin Hanks’s knowledge of indie music and Bradley Whitford tells hilarious jokes and does a mean splits!
Tilda was wonderfully gracious and the photographs for the article came out beautifully, but the video piece didn’t really turn out the way I envisioned it. I had big plans. I had mapped out several cool concepts involving several beautiful glass vases and water and a Patti Smith poem, but she nixed everything. You never know going into a photo shoot with someone you’ve never met whats going to happen. Most of the time people like to have some sort of prop or element that they can engage with and I always have something to offer my subjects. Obviously my pitch didn’t go over very well, so I’m a little disappointed with this piece. That said, I shot the interview and edited in a few of the images from the shoot and this is what I came up with. I also struggled to get a descent sound recording. We shot this piece at Industria studio 1, which is similar to a cave and is not sound proof, so the banging that was happening in one of the other studios that was unfortunately synchronized with Tilda’s answers really put a crimp in my style. Trying to tack on a video shoot on the back end of a photo shoot is definitely the challenge we all face in todays reality.
Every now and then I get handed a project that is so cool that it sounds too good to be true. When the band Violent Soho asked my to photograph a group of kids dressed in post-apocalyptic attire wearing a crown of thorns and yielding home made weapons I couldn’t believe it. Of course I immediately cast my daughter and her friends for the project and proceeded to put together the costumes and props. We shot the job at Fast Ashley’s in Brooklyn, the first half of the day dedicated to the band photos (which I will eventually get around to posting) and the second half of the day to shooting the kids. It was a memorable day, reminiscent of my days of shooting bands in the studio, with the added energy of all the kids running around in crazy outfits, having the time of their lives.
I am a reasonably healthy person, I don’t drink or smoke and although Im no marathoner, I run about 15 to 20 miles a week. But when it comes to coffee thats where I let it all hang out. Am I a coffee snob? I don’t know. I just prefer my joe to be extremely strong and rich and black. Usually I drink americano’s but occasionally I indulge in a macchiato or even a gibraltar. Anyway to get to the point, I have been working on a series of portraits of factory workers and when I found out that my coffee shop, La Colombe, had a factory in Philly I got really excited and started to plan a trip. I really didnt know what to expect when I arrived and I was amazed by the scope of the operation. Breathing in a fine mist of coffee dust, I hung out with the guys on the floor and really got a sense of the process of roasting coffee beans. I hadn’t planned on it but I found myself motivated to shoot a fair amount of video and together with the stills I ended up with this mashup industrial piece which I made for no other reason except that I LOVE coffee!
