@drivenbyboredom

15 years ago a German book publisher reached out to me about doing a book with them. They mostly published books of erotic photography so when I took the lunch meeting with them I told them I wasn't interested in doing something like that. I pitched them on a concept I had called DRINK FIGHT FUCK which was a book of my most insane photos titled after an infamous punk song by the more infamous GG Allin. I would try and desexualize nudity by putting those photos next to fight photos and try and tell a story of just a completely chaotic life, mostly centered around downtown NYC in the mid 2000s. The publisher loved the idea. He told me that the erotic photography was what paid the bills, but he didn't get into publishing to do that. He wanted to make art. He told me he didn't care if it lost money, he would just print it at the same time as a known money maker. I took him at his word and we worked on the book for two years. We had countless calls and made dozens of edits to the book. We hadn't laid out the text yet or designed the cover and we were still going back and forth about a few things, but he was coming to NYC and we were finally going to sign the contract. I should have known something was up when he told me to meet him at an art gallery instead of his hotel room, but when I got there he gave me the news. His distributor wouldn't take the book. He said sex was fine, violence was fine, but sex and violence is unacceptable. And that was just that. Two years down the drain. He didn't try and work with me on another concept or try and find another distributor. He just dropped me and moved on to some bullshit book like Sexy Legs Vol. 3 or whatever. I will say that in retrospect it's probably good that book never came out as it was wildly fucked up and I probably would have been canceled or at least sued at some point for it. Let's just say I have some photos of celebrities in some situations they probably wouldn't want to be made public... But yeah, I still have the edit, and I actually still update it from time to time with new stuff. I don't think I would ever publish that exact book now, but I do think there is a book in there somewhere. My 20s (and 30s honestly) were fucking chaotic, and I do want to tell that story eventually...

2 replies

1 recast

15 reactions