opening post card

pre-exhibit brainstorm

my piece

My show “From the Brickyard to Old Farm Road” opens today.  These images were shot on an island where I grew up spending my summers and highlight the vibrant unique nature of a place that has always been close to my heart. The Brickyard is a beach where I spent my childhood days and where my mom currently resides on island and Old Farm road is where my dad now has a house and where I stay. The show captures everything in between.

Fireworks, 2010

Old Farm Road, 2008

I was hired a last month for a great assignment shooting the 15 finalists for the Do Something Awards. If you’re not familiar with this organization, be sure to check it out. The Do Something Awards honor the best young world-changers, 25 and under, that are making the world a better place. They represent the pivotal doers in their field, cause or issue. These kids were amazing! They have now been narrowed down to 5 nominees, who you can read about here. The Awards will air live on VH1 on July 19th and one lucky winner will be given the $100,000 grand prize to use toward their cause.

I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to my fast-paced digital workflow. Been a long long while since I’ve shot film. Shooting film is a whole other ball game but I wanted to give it a whirl. Big thanks to Tim for lending me his Mamiya 7 back in April. I have to admit,  it was kinda difficult  for me to make the switch. Not only in the shooting aspect, but after getting the negatives developed, they sat on my desk for two months before I got to scanning them. As pleased as I am with the results, think this girl will be sticking to digital for now. (although keep your eyes out for a future post with some film scans from my trip to brazil this past spring)

and thanks to evan for letting me photograph him!

An outake from a shoot last week with fashion blogger Maya Villiger.

A few weeks ago saw this post over at Lenscratch and just love the work so thought I’d share.

A simple fresh idea well executed. Nice job Monica Orozco!

“It Lasted 16 Outfits”is a re-enactment of five weeks of my misadventures in dating in L.A. The first bloom of love may fade quickly, but a good outfit lasts forever. These self-portraits were shot in the exact places where Mr. X and I went on our whirlwind mini-romance and offer a peek inside the female side of the ritual: the mating dance, the dressing game, the spectacle, the theater. Are the outfits a shield for or a reflection of the woman within? Who knows. Who was he? Does it matter? The fact is that love is a many splendored thing. And SHE wears many many outfits.

Do you know about couchsurfing? If not, you must go here, check it out, then come back to this post. My first and only couchsurfing experience happened in the northeast of Brazil while traveling solo through the region my last month living in the country. I was blessed to have had an extremely positive experience and therefore have become a huge couchsurfing advocate based off of that one exchange.

While living in Brooklyn last fall  I decided to reach out to the Brooklyn couchsurfing community (hundreds and hundreds here!) and started taking portraits of surfers in their homes, but the project never really panned out. I wasn’t clear on the direction I guess and wound up with singular portraits.

Then this past winter I decided to check out one of the many local couchsurfing meetup parties that occur in Brooklyn and had the idea to photograph the people there. I enlisted my trusted roomie Kara as an assistant and set up shop in the basement and shot portraits of over 100 people.

Quite an interesting community these Brooklyn couchsurfers. Extremely diverse and international. Heard numerous languages throughout the night and even got to speak Portuguese to a few. Some had literally flown in that morning and didn’t know where else to go. Others clearly revolve their social lives around the meetups and greeted old friends. Overall a young crowd.

I definitely want to do more with this community, photographically, but I’m not sure quite yet in what capacity. I actually rarely shoot in a studio setting, so I’m not sure that the above is the way to go. It’s something that I’m working on. Hopefully some point in the future I will have a new body of couchsurfers to share with you.

Many thanks to Joe Che for organizing the event and for being an all around cool guy.

We say good bye to an old rug.

I think I’ve blogged about Shen Wei before. He has just released a new series on his website though that I wanted to share. As someone who also takes a lot of self portraits, often naked, you can see why I was immediately drawn to this body of work. Often I question the why of my self portraiture. For me, it has continued to be a way to explore and experiment, to take risks and push boundaries. After seeing this body of work, I immediately realized how much harder I need to be pushing. Shen says it best “it is a process of self observation and self discovery, as well as a provocative way to explore my sense of security through understanding the tension between freedom and boundaries.”