In 2013 I had this idea to do a road trip across Route 66 so I launched a Kickstarter to do a small zine to help pay for the trip. The Kickstarter did better than expected and then I sold the trip as a web series (which is now thankfully gone from the internet) and using that money I was able to fly (or bus) a bunch of nude models to me for different parts of the trip. I then sold a bunch of those photos to Hustler Magazine so the girls got paid as well (originally most of them just did it for a free road trip). I ended up expanding the trip to 31 days and while I was on the trip I picked up a job shooting a music festival in Chicago two days before I was supposed to fly home out of Detroit. I had to cut a couple days off the trip and absolutely book it from SF to Chicago (I got pulled over five time, but only two tickets), but I ended up making so much money off the trip that I turned all the photos into my first book, Get Your Kicks. I shot 67 rolls of film on the trip, but as fate would have it, I lost one of them along the way, so I ended up developing 66 rolls from Route 66 (and Detroit, Vegas and SF). Route 66 goes from Chicago to LA but I flew in and out of Detroit because renting a car there was much, much cheaper and it's a short drive to Chicago. I have a few friends in Detroit and one of them I photographed in the famous abandoned Packard plant. From there I drove to Chicago to start the trip, but while I was there I photographed a model that was a friend of a friend at Navy Pier which is sort of the unofficial start of Route 66. That night I crashed at my friend Joe Swanberg's place (IYKYK) and then picked up a friend of mine and drove her to St. Louis. In St. Louis I took her to the bus station and then another friend of mine showed me her city and we had a blast and took a bunch of fun photos along the way. We actually got kicked out of the City Museum for shooting nudes - actually we didn't even get kicked out, they just told us to stop but we felt super awkward and left. The next day I flew in Charlotte StokeIy who was an American Apparel model/ porn star and an absolute muse of mine and I drove her to Oklahoma City and flew her back out from there. At this point I didn't really have anyone to photograph for a while but I did have a good friend who lived there so I went to hang out with her. She had just broken up with someone and just decided to take a couple days off of work and come adventure with me for a few days. The funny thing is she was my closest friend when the trip started and we got along the least. I did get a few photos of her I loved though that are in the book. She also got me out of one of those five speeding tickets. I dropped her off in Amarillo, which is home to one of Route 66s most iconic attractions, the Cadillac Ranch. I didn't have anyone to photograph there so I went on this old site where you could find models called Model Mayhem and there were only two girls in all of Amarillo who shot nudes. I contacted them both and it just happened that one of them not only was available to shoot, but was a fan of my work already. I think she was the only person I paid in actual cash at the time (everyone got paid when I sold the work later) and she did it for $50 so that worked out really well. From there I was alone until I got to Albuquerque. I was so lucky that my friend Ash was able to meet me there. I was calling everyone I could think of because I didn't have a single model between Amarillo and LA and I didn't really know what to do. Ash was like "I would do it but I'm in Vegas." I ended up buying her a last minute flight from LAS to ABQ and then drove her back to Vegas since it was just a short detour off the "Mother Road". We also took a detour to go to the Grand Canyon which was amazing. It started raining so hard and we thought it would be ruined but we got about 20 minutes of sun and it was so, so worth it. I can't imagine most people spend less than 30 minutes at the Grand Canyon, but I will never forget that shit. The Vegas detour worked out really well. It was offseason in Vegas and I got a really nice hotel room for a couple of days for really cheap. I had been staying at the worst motels you could imagine along the trip so that was pretty nice, plus an old booty call of mine lives there so I got to hang out with her. The first night I was there she brought over two pon star friends of hers to use my hotel's pool and it turns out one of them I knew and she just happened to be flying to LA in a couple of days so I convinced her to cancel her flight and I would drive her to LA and we could shoot along the way. It worked out so perfectly and I was able to find a model for some really iconic Route 66 spots. When I got to LA I did a few other shoots and partied there for a week. My brother lives there so I just crashed on his couch. I did do one more Route 66 specific shoot on the ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier which is the unofficial ending of Route 66. After my week in LA I drove up to SF because at that point I had never been and stayed with a girl I used to hang out with in LA who had moved up there. I got a fucking crazy story about her from that trip, but that's not for public consumption. Feel free to ask me about it if we ever meet IRL. I did three more photo shoots while I was in SF and I was planning on heading up to Portland and Seattle after that, but I booked that gig in Chicago and just sprinted across the country. I did pick up a hitchhiker at one point but other than that it was just me and the road. In Chicago I shot this festival and amazingly had a free place to stay because a fan of mine was out of town and just let me stay at his apartment. Absolutely wild, but he got a thanks in my book and I am sure I sent him a print or something to thank him. I ended up driving back to Detroit a day early because I backed into a sign advertising geodes at the famous Rainbow Rock Shop in Holbrook, AZ and apparently my car insurance only was good for 30 days and my trip was 31. I had to return the car before they closed the day before my flight. It's a short drive to Detroit but there were two huge crashes less than a mile apart and traffic just completely stopped for hours. I got to the rental car place minutes before they closed and made it before my insurance ran out. (After all that, they never even noticed the cracked taillight). This was a time before Uber and I took a rental car shuttle to the airport and then took a hotel shuttle from there to my hotel and the next day I went home. Everyone who backed my Kickstarter ended up getting a book instead of the little black and white photocopied zine they were expecting and all the extra copies I made sold out almost instantly. Looking back on it, I would have done a lot of things differently (as far as what I photographed and what went in the book) but I am still very proud of the book and it is almost impossible to find and when it comes up quickly sells for many times what it sold for originally. One day I would love to do a larger road trip book with a lot of this stuff in it, but for now the only way to see most of it is by tracking down the book. The end.

3 replies

2 recasts

16 reactions

Vacation week starts tomorrow so I might be afk a bit, so let me leave you guys with all the things I am known for on here... a /cute-animals, a /diptychs, a half naked photo of a conventionally attractive woman and a story. First of all, no dogs were harmed in this story, in fact that dog fucking loved it. He would get thrown to a couch and then immediately would run back to her arms to get tossed again over and over. It was so cute. Anyway, It's like late 2011 and I am in Miami for Art Basel and I didn't have a place to stay and I didn't want to pay for a hotel so I start hitting people up. I eventually find this girl that I barely knew who let me crash on that tan couch in the photo. The girl with the dog, let's call her Julia, was sleeping on the couch that the dog is being tossed on. Turns out she lived in NYC too. Over the week or so we were they we hit it off and started hanging out together when we got back in NYC. We were both seeing other people and that caused whatever we had to be fairly dramatic. I remember we got in one argument that was particularly awful, but for some reason we kept hanging out. She lived in this tiny shithole apartment, but it was in the East Village so probably cost a few thousand dollars even back then, but I never got the idea that she was super wealthy or anything. That is until she went to visit her dad in Jordan. She was Jordanian and she flew back home for a couple of weeks and we would Skype and it was this really beautiful house, but I didn't realize how crazy it was until a servant came and brought he lunch on a silver platter in the middle of our call. Turns out her dad was some sort of Jordanian royal or something. Anyway, here's where the story gets interesting... At that time in early 2012 Arab Spring had come to Jordan and there were protests in the streets so she joined them. She ended up getting arrested for protesting and was forced to stay in Jordan until her trial. Over the next coming weeks she ended up meeting a guy at a protest and started dating him and just never came back to the US and I never heard from her again. The end.

3 replies

0 recast

25 reactions

My top three people I would want to photograph is 1) John Waters 2) Werner Herzog and 3) Dave Grohl. The third one is interesting because I don't like the Foo Fighters and I have had the opportunity to photograph him twice and didn't so I feel like that's all a slightly interesting storytime for today... Real quickly, John Waters and Werner Herzog are two of my favorite directors of all time. I have seen nearly everything either of them have made which in Herzog's case was very difficult and quite expensive as I had to purchase some incredibly rare DVDs to do it. They also happen to be incredibly interesting people. I have read multiple books by both of them and they are extremely photogenic. I have watched them both speak and technically I have taken Herzog's photo but he was on stage and I only had a little point and shoot camera. Okay, and now the Dave Grohl of it all. I was 13 years old when Kurt Cobain died and Nirvana was by far my favorite band at the time. I honestly didn't really care about any other bands so when he died I didn't know what to do. I ended up rereading this book about them called Come As You Are and every time Kurt mentioned a band I would write it down and try and find their music. I would get cassettes from friend's older brothers and buy CDs with my allowance but for my 14th birthday I got a Black Flag CD and it instantly changed my life forever. Punk was the best education I ever had and by the time I was 16 I ran a small DC record label and had published multiple punk fanzines. The reason I even picked up a camera, or started my first website, was all in the service of punk rock. As much as I loved Nirvana I wasn't particularly a Dave Grohl fan because their early music before he joined was my favorite. It's not like I wouldn't have lost my mind if I had met him when I was a kid, but he was Ringo Starr not Lennon or McCartney. When the Foo Fighters came out I had zero interest in the band the only reason I ever paid attention to their music was because of Michel Gondry's video for Everlong. But there was one thing about Dave Grohl that interested me... He was from DC. Well technically, like me, he was from northern Virginia, and at some point he moved back home. When I was in the middle of putting out punk records and zines he bought a house five minutes away from my parents. When they were building it my friends broke in and stole small trinkets like a receipt that had his name on it and some garbage the realtor had left there. Everyone would see him around town, or at least would lie and say they had. My best friend saw him at 7-11 and a friend of a friend got drunk and knocked on his door in the middle of the night and ended up getting arrested for it. Fast forward decades and I see my friend's band The Bronx is playing in Brooklyn a few blocks away from my apartment. I didn't even know they were in town until an hour before the show so when I got there I wasn't on the orignal guest list. My name was scrawled at the bottom next to one other last minute edition: Dave Grohl. My buddy Jorma was friend's with him and I think Dave was in town for SNL or something and so halfway into their set he walked in and stood right in front of me. Now that I think about it, I might have a cell phone photo of the band with the back of his head in the shot, but I don't think that counts as taking his photo. Anyway, after the show we are all hanging out in the green room and I am sort of involved in conversations with him but we didn't get introduced and I didn't talk directly to him or anything. It was less than ten of us including the band so at any point I could have talked to him and I could have taken his photo, but honestly I just didn't care that much and I didn't want to bug him. After the band loaded out we were all standing outside and people were taking selfies with him and as more people gathered you could see him getting a bit annoyed. He was waiting on an Uber and as soon as it showed up he straight sprinted to it. To this day I have no idea if he did this intentionally, or he actually did run full speed into a parking payment machine. It was so fucking funny and over the top that it felt like this Chevy Chasesque slapstick bit, but either way it was one of the craziest things I have ever seen a celebrity do. It felt like a movie. Shortly after that I am inspired to finally the DC episode of his HBO show Sonic Highways about different music cities. I had been meaning to watch it because I knew it would dive into the DC punk scene a bit, but I kept putting it off until I had run into him. I instantly regretted not watching it sooner. I could not believe how similar his upbringing was to mine. In my brain he was so much older than me because he was in my favorite band as a kid, but he left the DC punk scene in basically 1991 and I joined it in 1994. We knew so many of the same people and had so many of the same experiences and it's just so weird how the reason I got in to that same scene was because of him leaving it. If I had seen that documentary a couple weeks earlier I would have been so excited to talk to him about it and that's honestly the main reason I want to photograph him, is just to talk to him about 90s DC punk rock and the weird ways his life intersected mine. I should also mention that I have had two chances to photograph the Foo Fighters at music festivals and both times I have turned it down. The first time was because they had a contract saying they owned the rights to any photos I took, which, fuck that. And the second time, just a couple of years ago, they didn't make us sign a contract, but we did have to shoot from the soundboard instead of near the stage. I hate photos like that because every photographer's images look exactly the same so I never bring my long lens to festivals because if I can't get close I don't want the shot. That being said I do wish I had photographed them once because I am working on this licence plate zine where I match funny license plates I have found with my photos and at that same festival I didn't photograph him at in 2023 I found this license plate and man do I wish I had a photo of him to go with it... The end.

3 replies

0 recast

25 reactions

I was just reminded about the time I was on a crowded subway train and I offered my seat to a very pregnant woman. She was only one stop away so she didn't want to sit down and then get up again so she was just standing in front of me and I suddenly saw her start to sway. I looked up at her face and her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted and fell stomach side down. Thank god I was looking at her when it happened because I was able to catch her and put her in my seat. She came to and I was going to get off a stop early and help her get home but another person that they could help her. I watched, through closing subway doors, them walk her over to a bench, sit her down and then just left her there.

2 replies

0 recast

8 reactions

My friend Malice got breast cancer recently and had a double mastectomy. She's a stripper and a model and so it has not only been a horrible experience but she's missing out on work so I am selling a print of a photo from an album cover to raise a little money for her, but first I wanted to tell you a little about how we met. Malice is this iconic model in the punk world and I had wanted to take her photo forever but I didn't know her or anything. Anyway, back in early 2013 I am in Vegas covering the AVN Awards (the Oscars of Porn) for Hustler Magazine. Despite Hustler's reputation, they were one of my favorite clients and sort of let me pick my own assignments. They also are one of only two clients I have ever had that would let me shoot film and reimburse me for the film/processing. I pitched them on a behind the scenes shoot where I would photograph porn stars getting ready for the awards, hanging out in their hotel rooms, etc. I have done pretty much the same story for Vice as and the Daily Beast as well, but let's just say there was a lot more nudity in the Hustler story. Anyway, I am walking around the convention and I run into a heavily tattooed porn star named Bonnie Rotten. I had actually met her a year earlier and we followed each other on Twitter and stuff and she had sort of blown up since then. I told her I was doing this thing for Hustler and asked if she wanted to be part of it. She was down and told me to come by her hotel room the next morning because she was getting her makeup done and that would be the perfect time to do it. So when I get there Malice is also there getting her makeup done! Turns out Malice was there hanging out with Bonnie while she was doing her famous porn star thing. I told Malice I was a big fan and after I was done shooting with Bonnie I asked her if she was down to get in a few shots. I ended up taking this kinda iconic shot of them on a couch just wearing fur coats that I can't really post here because nudity but I think it's been in more than one of my books/zines. Anyway, around that same time I meet this guy who runs a record label and it turns out he had put out some records for this punk band The Dwarves. They just happen to be one of my favorite bands of all time, and most of their album covers have a naked woman on the cover. I told the guy if he ever put out another Dwarves record I would love to submit some photos for the cover which he could use for free. Fast forward a year later and this guy hits me up. He is releasing an album of a Dwarves live radio show appearance called Radio Free Dwarves. They need a cover that is somehow radio themed. The art direction I get is they want to shoot in an actual radio station with a girl naked except for a ski mask. They want me to find the model and the location and shoot for free. If it was nearly any other band I would have told them to fuck off, but I just happened to be in LA, so I reached out to my friend Brian Redban who ran Joe Rogan's podcast studio before they moved to Austin and he said we could shoot there. Now I just needed a model and I immediately thought of Malice. She's so iconic in the punk scene and I just thought she would be perfect for it. This was all so last minute and we almost didn't make it because of scheduling and LA traffic but we pulled it off. I think I had to pick Malice up and drop her off too. The entire budget for the shoot was $100 which I gave to Malice. My time and the location they got for free. (I did get $300 years later to relicense the photo for a rerelease.) The funny thing is after all that they didn't even use any of the radio themed photos. The photo they used was just shot up against a wall. There is a "brown bag" special edition record which has a VERY NSFW outtake from the shoot that is much more radio themed, but the photo that ended up on the main record, the tape and the CD release (Plus a poster and a skateboard) has nothing radio themed on it. Oh, one other crazy thing about that shoot is that it was so last minute that the Dwarves never approved of the Malice until we had already shot and they were pissed about it. They wanted someone younger and innocent looking with less tattoos, but once they saw the photos they loved them. Malice is a huge Dwarves fan (which is why she did the shoot for $100) and ended up doing a bunch more stuff with them after that and you love a happy ending. The singer from the Dwarves actually hit me up this morning about buying a bunch of these prints to support Malice. I realize this is way too long, but Malice rules, we have become pretty good friends since 2013 and I have even gone hiking with her and her mini dobermans. I just wanted to do something for her and here's a chance to do something good for a wonderful person and also get one of my prints cheap. They are $50 each, signed and numbered to just 13. I posted these on my IG story yesterday and half of them are gone already so grab one now. The photo is an uncensored, unretouched photo of the album cover, available at https://www.shopdbb.com!

1 reply

1 recast

10 reactions

I did all those "We used to have fun" posts so I had to do one last one. At the end of 2019 my roommate and one of my closest friends died it took me a while to process and so I waited until after Christmas to clean out her room. Her parents gave me some money to pay for rent through January. I was traveling that month anyway so my plan was to get it ready and rent the place out for February 1st. I called my landlord to ask them to paint the place so I could find a new roommate (it hadn't been painted in 15+ years) and they told me they couldn't get to it until March 4th. I was pisssed but I could make it a month without that rent. On March 4th they canceled and told me they would come March 14th, 2020. The day NYC shut down. The room got painted but I never did get another roommate. The world shut down and I had to get some money from my parents until unemployed and covid relief kicked in. I turned 40 alone on my couch a few weeks into the pandemic. My job as an event photographer was pretty much toast. I never really recovered from that. Eventually I launched and OnlyFans with all my old NSFW photos and the money was good back then. I started dating someone and she moved in and helped with rent. Eventually things started opening up and I went and shot my first music festival in 18 months. I guess I had gotten really out of shape or something because every day I would get back to the hotel and my back was killing me from carrying my gear everywhere. A few days later I was in so much pain I couldn't stand up. Turns out I had herniated four discs in my back. I could barely walk for nearly two years. At some point during all this someone bought my building and raised my rent $800 in one year. We could afford it, but barely. A year later they raised it another $400. We thought about it and realized we could probably still afford it, but what happens when they raise it again next year? It was time to leave NYC. After 18 years in the same Williamsburg apartment I finally left my home. We moved to North Carolina and eventually bought a house and now we fucking bird watch and work on the house and when I'm not working I feel like I am retired. All our friends here have kids so we mostly hang out by ourselves and it's honestly a great life, but a pretty tame one. She still works in NYC and I still get to travel and do some crazy shit once in a while, but we are officially old now and the wild life I lead was over the day my roommate died. The end.

0 reply

1 recast

9 reactions

This just reminded me of a story... I was living in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy. I was at home bunkered down waiting for the power to go out, but it never happened so I am just watching the news and seeing lower Manhattan completely blacked out, with the water rising. The journalist in me kicked in and I decided I had to be there, so I put on my rain gear, grabbed my camera and started walking over the Williamsburg Bridge towards the Lower East Side. The bridge had the lights on still, but only half way. When you got closer to the city the bridge was in complete darkness. The wind was blowing like crazy and I had to hold on to the handrail on the side of the bridge just to keep my balance. It was fucking insane. So imagine it's pitch black, rain coming in sheets and I am doing whatever I can not to get blown away, when suddenly, two feet in front of me, on the other side of the handrail is two goths, standing up, pants off, trying to be perfectly still so I didn't see that they were clearly fucking on the bridge. I tried to hide my laughter and gave them a nod of admiration as I walked by these true heroes of the dark. Just as a postscript to that story, the experience covering the storm that night was something I will never forget. By the time I got there much of the water had receded, but I was walking through the public housing by the East River and the water was up to my waist in places. The FDR was flooded and a ConEd power station had exploded. Unfortunately digital cameras weren't great in the dark back then so my photos weren't great, but it was a truly insane experience.

1 reply

0 recast

4 reactions

It's 1997 and the girl on the left, Shanna, was my first serious "adult" crush (I was 17) and my first kiss. The guy on the right was my best friend Marshall. They worked together scooping ice cream. When I met her she had just gotten out of juvie because a girl in her neighborhood ripped out her eyebrow ring in a fight so she hit the girl in the face with her skateboard, trucks first. I was in love... and then the two of them started dating. It really crushed me and I think it did some pretty serious harm to our relationship. She cheated on him with me and I cheated on my first girlfriend with her. Easily my biggest regret in life and I never cheated on anyone again. Marshall and I stayed friends for a few years after that but we grew apart. On September 11th he and I went down to watch the Pentagon burn. I tried to take photos but it didn't really work. For some reason that was the last time he talked to me for nearly 13 years. In 2104 he wrote me an email. I don't know why that was the moment he decided to forgive me, but I started crying as I responded to his email. I was so happy to have him back in my life. He was living in outside of Pittsburgh and working on a farm. My girlfriend and I were planning a road trip from NYC to the south anyway, so we just had to do a little detour to hit Braddock, PA. It was so amazing to see him again. To this day we are still in touch. I went to Braddock on another road trip and I was supposed to stay with him, not knowing he had cats. I am insanely allergic. I was gonna go get a hotel but he told me that he had the keys to his neighbors house they are fixing up. It had no power, and holes in the ceiling, but they did have an air mattress. It was a mildly terrifying experience and I didn't get a ton of sleep, but very glad I did it cause it's a great memory. That should be the end of the story but just a couple months ago I found out that Shanna is somehow dating another one of my former close friends. They live hours apart from each other but I guess they reconnected via fucking Facebook and are somehow seeing each other. I haven't talked to her in more than 20 years and I haven't talked to him outside of a couple DMs in a decade, but I guess I am happy for them. The end.

0 reply

2 recasts

13 reactions

One photo, three short stories. 1) This was taken the second to last time I ever fronted a band. That night because our drummer made me pay him out of my pocket so he could take an Uber home instead of getting on the train with his symbols. The guitarist and bassist had already left and I had to deal with the drummer's bullshit on my own and so I threw $40 at him and quit the band. The guitarist and bassist told me they would fire the drummer if I came back so I did and we played one more show and it was a complete disaster because we practiced exactly one time with the new drummer and we hadn't played in six months and I forgot half the words. 2) The guy in the photo is Badlands Booker aka Badlands Chugs, the vital competitive eater who chugs massive amounts of liquid on the internet. In like 2004 or 2005 someone gave me the Mp3s of his rap album which was all about competitive eating and I was obsessed and I think I still know an entire verse to one of his songs from back then. I ended up going to a bunch of Coney Island hot dog eating contests, booking a band I managed to be the opening act and then eventually covering it as a journalist. In the process I have become friendly with a bunch of competitive eaters including Badlands. 3) The woman in the photo is a friend of mine who years earlier I went on a date with. She interested in comedy and so I took her to my friend's weekly comedy night who often has some huge names show up to work on their sets and that night a pretty famous comedian came. We were all hanging out at the bar after the show and she was just hitting on him the whole time. She got kinda drunk and at one point she kicked me in the balls "as a joke" and then got really mad at me at the end of the night when I wouldn't go home with her. Somehow after all that we remained friends and a few years ago I did a "sexy" photo shoot for her for a comedy show flyer where she was in Agent Provocateur lingerie but wearing those glasses with the fake nose and mustache attached and holding a rubber chicken which if you made it this far I will post in the next cast. The end.

2 replies

0 recast

17 reactions

Oh man I forgot about this until I hit send but before I lived in NYC I was managing a band and we played a show in the East Village and I met this girl who worked at the venue and got her number. I hit her up later but we never ended up meeting up. That night ended up being one of the biggest snowstorms in NYC history and we got stuck in NYC. The band and I had all split up to find couches to crash on and for some reason I couldn't stay with the person I crashed with the night before so I ended up hitting up the girl from the night before to ask her if I could stay with her. I think my friend Alex who was doing sound for us crashed on her couch and I ended up sleeping in her bed. I think it was my first proper one night stand and I did it 100% so that I didn't have to sleep on the floor. While we were hooking up I looked down and saw she had a lower back tattoo of some symbol but I didn't know what it was so after we were done I asked her what it was and she wouldn't tell me. We end up staying up until dawn and when the sunlight started pouring into her window I look up at a poster I hadn't seen the night before and it had the same logo. Oh my god she had a Hanson tramp stamp! Years later when I met Hanson I told them that story and they thought it was hilarious that my first one night stand was with a Hanson fan. Little bonus ending is that I have another friend who loved Hanson (they actually put on an amazing show) and I snuck her backstage to meet the band and she was there when I told that story. Apparently the Hanson base is small enough that she knew exactly who I was talking about just based on the tattoo. A few weeks later I get an email from the one night stand who I had not spoken with since that night because she found out I had told Hanson about her and thought that was amazing. Okay, the end of my pointless Hanson adjacent story.

0 reply

2 recasts

6 reactions

Mini story time: One time I was photographing a porn star I had met once before at her apartment and she was going through her clothes looking for an outfit to the shoot. She said something like "I have so many festival clothes but I don't go to enough festivals." I jokingly invited her to the Gathering of the Juggalos, since I was going the next weekend and she canceled some work and just came with me to the weirdest festival on earth in the middle of nowhere Indiana.

4 replies

3 recasts

24 reactions

It's been a while but I am about to drop a long thread on you with a lot of pictures. If you get anything out of this please share because I have a feeling it's going to take me a long time. A lot of times I think about defining moments of my career, big jobs, viral photos, successful art shows, media moments, book releases, etc. But as I slowly work on a new book that's more of a retrospective I have started thinking more about defining moments of my creative output. The beginning of course was when I picked up a camera for the first time... or at least shortly after. My first photo class in high school was fucking boring and I think everyone was surprised when I took Photo II but when I got to start shooting whatever I wanted my work got much better and I fell in love with it, documenting punk bands and my friends and I won some art awards and got recruited to art schools like I was an athlete or something.

2 replies

8 recasts

22 reactions

I tend to tell some crazy stories from time to time, so here's a super boring one. My fiance, Shannon, and I have very different sleep schedules. She goes to bed three hours before I do and she wakes up two hours before I do. It's actually great for both of us to have that little bit of alone time and we have different chores. Every night I make the coffee so all she has to do is press a button in the morning, and then when it's time for me to wake up she brings me some coffee. It works great... when she's in town. Shannon commutes to NYC for work twice a month for 3 or four days. Her flight is early in the morning so she wakes up at 4:30 am. Since I go to bed at 2am already, and I don't want to risk waking her up on a night where she's already not getting her 8 hours, I sleep on the couch for a bit and then crawl into bed when she gets up. Last night I couldn't get to bed until almost 3am and it took me a while to get back to sleep when she woke me up at 4:30. I am asleep for maybe 30 minutes when the fire alarm in my apartment building goes off and doesn't turn off for another half hour. I am now wide awake and it took me until nearly 7am to get back to sleep. At some point I cancel my 9am alarm and set one for 10am and when that thing goes off I am so deep in sleep that I am completely disoriented and I spend another thirty minutes just trying to be awake enough to get coffee. It's after 11am before I even get out of bed. So long, boring, story short, I am just now sitting down to the computer at 12:30pm, so gm.

3 replies

0 recast

7 reactions

Let's drop a storytime on you guys cause I am in that kinda mood. It's gonna be a crazy one, the kind of story I used to tell (and post NSFW photos from) on AlfaFrens before that ended. Instead of crazy NSFW photos I will instead illustrate this X-Rated story with a very wholesome photo of my ex on her birthday. Anyway, back in my early 30s I was dating a fairly famous adult film star and I was on a photo shoot with a model and she mentioned she had a huge crush on my girlfriend so I arranged a photoshoot with both of them and we all hit it off, but the model had a boyfriend, and not only was he her boyfriend but they had been together her entire adult life and I believe they had lost their virginities to each other. Very wholesome. A few months later they ended up breaking up and my girlfriend suggested we take her on a date and she was all about it. The three of us got dinner together and went back to my girlfriend's place and had one of the craziest threesomes I have had in my life, and I have had an unfair amount and I took a lot of photos. She ended up staying over and the next day we all went to a pool party and ended up having sex in the pool in front of a bunch of people without them even knowing. It was a top tier 24 hours. My girlfriend lived in LA and I was in NYC and I left the next day but we kept in touch with the model. We had all these plans to hang out again next month, but less than a week later she got back with her dude and that was it. A year later she had a kid with him and I think they are married to this day. I have no idea if she ever told him about it, but could you imagine being in a relationship with your high school sweetheart and finding out during the one week you were broken up she had sex with only the second guy in her life and he was some creepy photographer, had her first gay experience, with a porn star, had her first threesome and all of it was on film? That is some shit I don't think you can come back from mentally. Anyway, I hope they are happy. The end.

4 replies

0 recast

12 reactions

I met my friend Ginger at a party I shot for a tattoo magazine called Inked back in 2009. She wasn't actually a sex worker herself but she worked at a high end brothel in Manhattan and we talked about doing a photo documentary about the place, but unsurprisingly her bosses shut down the idea. But we did have dinner meeting about it. After the meeting we went to this club Happy Ending where a bunch of my friends threw two different parties, one on each floor. Downstairs there were all these areas that used to be massage rooms when it was a massage parlor. Ginger and I shot a bunch of sexy pictures of her back there. We had planned on just being there for a drink and a few dirty photos, but two girls who lived in my building showed up and they wanted to party. The three of them proceed to do exactly that and we all had a pretty fun time. I have been slowly going back through my archives and uploading photos to drivenbyboredom.com, the site I launched almost 25 years ago. All the photos from that night are up now, except for the NSFW ones that are on my pay site, dbb.im.

2 replies

0 recast

18 reactions