She sold me the paper coasters in Tucson and had a trucker hat on and I asked if I could take her photo but without it on and she said she was vain but she would let me and I am glad she took the hat off because her eyes were cool.
She was at the front desk, then in the gallery as I looked at the exhibition. We got into a long discussion about the images in the show and that led to a discussion about my work which led to me asking her if she wanted to create some art with me which led to her saying yes which led us outside to take some photos I will use in a collage and also some straight portraits, of which this is one.
I think my dentist needs to use this in an ad campaign, don’t you?
Two days later the cheerleader was transformed into a race car driver.
I met her by accident elsewhere at the fair and stopped her to tell I had posted the photo of her as a cheerleader and the immediate response I got from a friend of hers who she went to high school with. She was very happy to hear it, saying it completely made her day.
We got into a conversation about how many costumes she has (about 150) and the amount of work she does traveling between Tulsa and Los Angeles.
She mentioned she needs to have photos taken of her in all her costumes to update her website and I offered my services to do the photo shoot but it never came about.
A variation on my ‘Truths and Things I Made Up About This Woman’ series.
He made me wait until he got his hat on before I could take his photo. The badge says ‘Single Action Shooting Society’. He is number 66566.
Notice his license plate. He likes his six shooters I guess!
2nd in the week long series on night images. The idea was to capture both the cute,
sweet smile all the other photographers were trying to get from her and then have her
turn her expression into a scream, similar to the graffitied image. I wanted to try to
capture the feeling of the surface pretty and the interior pain someone might feel at
the same time.
We were staying the night at the Inn at Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright’s one and only
freestanding ‘skyscraper’ in the world (it’s 16 stories high so it isn’t crazy tall by
any means). It is about 50 miles north of Tulsa in a town called ‘Bartlesville’ which
was the founding home of Phillips Petroleum. It has an art center on the first 2
floors along with a gift shop. We always find unique and interesting things in the
shop when we go there and this time we found an engaging and happy store clerk along
with the usual stuff. She said one of the statements in the piece to us and I kept
hearing the rhythm of it in my head after, but with different content each time and
that was the basis for the other ‘truths’ in the piece.
I had to drive my father’s belongings back to California from Oklahoma in the fall of 2007. I kept my camera next to me in the rented moving truck and took a lot of photos out the window as I went. The Texas panhandle is one of my favorite areas precisely because there is so little to see there. What that actually means is that the interesting things you do see are spread out, they are alone, by themselves, easy to spot and appreciate.
Sometimes in dense environments, just as in a dense piece of art, it is hard to discern what is there. That is ok in a museum where you have time to look, but on a road trip it is nice to see something coming 2 miles away!
I stopped at a convenience store outside Amarillo and the clerk’s eyes were blindingly bright and blue with the west Texas sun shining in the window. I asked her if I could take some photos of her eyes and, though she was chided by her fellow clerk, she said yes and was a wonderful, albeit fleeting, model.
