“When you’re poor, and you don’t have a house anymore, you can just look in the trash for a bag and make yourself some clothes.”
-Mette

Here’s a peak at the shoot we did this week with Shpetim Zero and his amazing hand crafted couture in the green of our Lincoln Heights heights above Skyfarm. Collaborating I had Sharon Gualt, LaChapelle’s brilliant make up artist, providing face like only she can and Larry McDanial spinning up into existence the extreme hair peaces he stayed up the whole night before building and the lovely Maria Bernaldez who Larry had met at Starbucks, lucky, and who was full pro and didn’t moan a bit as she froze and ached, instead she just shined. And of course my strong men, The Alex and new teammeeno handyman, Gabriel Brazil. Genius all around. Bravo, I love the fertility of our hillside.

Thence January really begins…

Bindi saw Wicked again this weekend. A friend sent an invitation to a light comedy about addiction later this summer. But the show I’m really waiting for is still batting around in the head of my new Copper Penny friend here. Having taken this picture, I assured her it would be neigh time to get her roll down on paper, cause boy can she spill out that yarn. Baptist minister’s daughter in West Texas is just the start…..

My friend Raquel Allegra does some amazing distressed shirts. They sell at fabulously high prices to distressed adult women. I suggested she try some kids stuff for me to shoot as we were going out to the Island for our yearly all families included jaunt. She really came through, as did my assorted mob of some of the best models I’ve ever worked with. The light, the setting, the emoting, the fit, the pose, the poise, the gesture, the gaze, the gift of privacy glimpsed were all perfect because the moment was perfect and I learned a great deal from that. As a photographer you witness the perfect moment. As a director you conjoin the bustling factors of the universe and of human consciousness to manufacture a space within which that perfect moment can take shape. Master and Voyeur. 

Made a new pal today, Maxi. Hair and MakeUP extraordinaire on the Kreesha Turner “Don’t Call Me Baby” shoot today. He let’s you know, he’s loud, voluptuously loud, that you can find his work at “Maxi, Maxi, Maxi dot com. That’s Maxi M-A-X-I three times dot com.” This is his oft repeated shpeel to make you remember Maximaximaxi.com, and it works. But I wondered why he left out that perfect winged or wingless mnemonic device: the ubiquitous monthly pad. Anyway, he came up with the wonderful hat and I quickly took him to the camera.

Mette often comes downstairs and joins in the shoot. She always seems to congeal that perfect moment we’re looking for. Check out my man WB’s collection, he really is well appointed, how could a man named Waraire not be, and he marveled completely at the tiny, half-dead possum we found in the garden while he was here. It almost won him over to the notion of wildlife at your fingertips, almost.

There is desire for control, for a new era, for moving into this new time with re-enthused authority. This is a new vision, because the eyes have been scrubbed with a cleansing sand and the beaches have lifted out of their fog. Power given over for want of something to say, to say about the shooting of horses, collapsing the cavalry, and bruising the wits of retreating soldiers, who take to the tide caught masts and the fancied but half-bombed ferris wheel. All this for youths who lose their faces in war.