These were all taken on a brilliant October day in Luray, Virginia. My eldest daughter was getting married and some of our dearest friends took the day off and drove from Annapolis, MD to be there. This is a collage of the mother and the eldest daughter of that family. It includes the fabric from their dresses, a necklace, freckles and collarbones.
Way back when, in the 1980s, there was a very young and stylish guy who came to work at the restaurant where I worked, Eulipia. He was 18. We became friends over many years of working together. He moved down to LA eventually and I met him once down there for dinner with his girlfriend. They eventually married and he became a flight attendant on USAIR.
They settled in Annapolis, MD and many years later what should happen but my daughter attended St. John’s College in Annapolis. We reconnected with him and his family and my daughter ended up very close to them all, babysitting the young ones, staying at their home one summer, etc. We would visit whenever we came to town.
So, now that 18 year old kid who met my daughter when she was born, was at her wedding 18 years later with his wife and daughters who I was able to photograph. It was a great and glorious reminder of the beauty that is within the longevity of relationships.
She served drinks at my father’s squadron reunion barbecue in Iowa. She watched and I could see she was impressed by the young marines in uniform who came to visit with the World War II vets.
It was very hot and humid day out and her skin glistened as it told a story of her own skirmishes and battles. Her bars and stars weren’t on her chest, but she earned them none the less.
My wife and I chaperoned about 40 teenagers to Disney World in 2007. We went for a ‘Singabration’ (I started calling the participants ‘singabrats’ haha). The week was filled with images and memories and stimulation. Watching the kids sleeping on the bus on the way home from Disney World, I imagined what all the kids were dreaming of, what little flotsam and jetsam of memories were being glued together in their brains.
I was waiting for my wife to finish getting her hair done and was talking to the owner about maybe helping her with the salon website. I asked if I could take some photos of the environment so I could look for some visual inspirations for the site. I kept finding lamps and lights and beautiful shadows. I saw a woman who was paying after finishing and all those lights and lamps seem to be lighting her just perfectly as well.
This image is a collage of 4 distinct photographs. I used an existing lamp in a foyer of a hotel in Luray, Virginia during the reception for my daughter’s wedding in October of 2006. I simply took off the lampshade to get the light I wanted. Two of the images are of the Model, a front face view and a 3/4 face view that I collaged together in Photoshop. At the same time I took those photos I took photos of her butterfly tattoo and her necklace, among other things. I later layered those onto the collage I had already created and slowly but surely melded them on top of the face image. It took a long time! Created using Photoshop CS3.
The Cake Seller – The Stranger Juxtaposition #7The cake seller at the outlet mall and the cake and the TV image of the flamenco dancer that I shot in the Bose store demo movie in the small dark theatre where they showed off their sound systems which I did not buy but I got a number of shots of the screen that I liked and then realized how the fit and imagined a story of love.
January 31, 2008
In the sunset district of San Francisco, October, 2007.
The gallery employee (I am imaging this but she probably isn’t, more likely a student or maybe a….no, I think I am right, a gallery something or other is likely) in the restaurant that I waited outside of while my wife went to the little girls room with the shoehorn (which wasn’t really in the restaurant, but a few doors down in the shoe store on a bench just sitting there by itself with a great reflection and I said it wrong, she didn’t go in the girl’s room with the shoehorn and the girls room did not have the shoehorn in it, just in case you got confused by my bad writing style) and the Avocados (which were in the market bin next to the tomatoes that were too red to put in the collage even though the photo had them in it and I liked how the red of the tomatoes brought out the red in the shoehorn, still it was too distracting) and the cleavage (which didn’t really belong to her, but to a woman on a bench in the bookstore at the magazine rack who I happened to walk by and noticed her necklace that was just a tad bit too far down her chest but it made me notice her) did it.
Parallel arms, lit pillow in the distance, sleep, warm skin tones, feelings, all combined so that I really liked this image. It is from a commissioned photo shoot, January, 2007.
I saw her across the large field as I left work. she was a tiny dot of fun in a field of darkening ice at dusk. I walked across the field with my camera and cleats and told her it would be a shame to witness someone having that much fun and not get a record of it. She was happy and polite and filled with joy. It was in her head, as it can be with any of us. She made me smile.
