You can read an interview on LOVING and learn about her secret blog.
She is an excellent photographer: Listen to her speak and see some of her work for Oxfam. Thank you Helena!

Here is Kate featured as a Lady of Castor & Pollux with a photo I took in her studio.

Artist Lisa Oppenheim’s series of worked based on the killed negatives of Walker Evans’ pictures reconstructs the missing hole punch and displays it next to a print from the photograph which Mr. Stryker struck out. She neatly touches on photography, memory, history, hidden versus revealed, reenactment and other smart stuff if you take the time to unpack the work.

I shot Lisa for The Ladies of Castor & Pollux and I’ve met her before but it is always funny what you learn about someone when you are taking their portrait. Like she is friend’s with my sister. Small world, right? (or maybe just small semiotics department at Brown University.)

Reece is Lady number 26 for Castor & Pollux’s Loving blog. You can read about her there.

Here’s the drinking part:
I had a Campari and soda before showing my work… which, I was thinking while ordering it, could be a bad idea. Turns out (so far) a Campari and soda is never a bad idea.

Here’s the weird part:
I watched a lot of photographer’s look at other photographer’s books. I even showed my work and looked at books as well.  It amazes me how quickly portfolio pages turned… like freakishly quickly (like Big Blue on Jeopardy quickly). I imagine authors write for other authors. I imagine directors make films for other directors. I imagine photographers make work for other photographers to look at (actually I know I make work in hopes that other photographers might look at it). So why so fast, photographers? There is so much to learn by looking at other photographer’s work (I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent looking at Horst hoping it just sinks in and becomes a part of what I know about photography). Obviously Horst wasn’t in attendance, having died in 1999, but I met Billy Kidd and his work is really good.

As an excuse, yes, the light was terrible and thus the books were hard to see but… Here’s another amazing part: Paul Moakley once, while looking at my book, said he should be able to tell if a photograph is good on a one inch black and white xerox.

Here’s the realization part about why the night was so amazing:
We are all there for a reason and the reason is because we want to be better photographers. We all need more work, more agents, more contacts, more… Campari and sodas. Maybe it’s because we turn the pages too fast. I’m a pretty bad judge of fashion photography but I can tell Guy Aroch is a genius, and to be less Jed Root-y about this post, so is Enrique Badulescu, Alasdair McLellan, etc. I can also tell that Mr. Aroch and Mr. Badulescu work their asses off… and I can tell that the whole review was basically a big heads up to let us all know that we should be working harder to: one, make better work, two, look at other work harder and more thoughtfully, three, think more, and four, use every opportunity to learn something and become a better photographer. Instead of flipping through other photographer’s books too quickly we can spend our time actually engaged which I imagine leads to better work and thus more work…  which is awesome because the reason we all do this is because we love taking photos. And that means we get to take more.

A big thank you to Mr. Hetherington for the heads up on the review. I never would have known about it otherwise.

Note 1: I haven’t sent my book out in quite a while (that is about to change STAT btw because that is kinda my job, right?) but in my rather meager experience, if you exclude Rob Haggart and Darrick Harris, the profession seems mostly run by women. Thus… I apologize to all the male PEs who can’t picture themselves in neon pink double waist belts.

Note 2: Harper’s Bazaar is giving props to Meredith and the previously featured Anndra Neen sisters at their Accessories Baazar.

Note 3: Art Department’s Frederike Helwig‘s pictures at West Virginia’s Greenbriar Hotel for the Meredith Wendell catalog are awesome.

“Sparkly and Smudgy” are words I have on a post-it as inspiration for how I want my portraits to look but I’ve been having focus issues. Sometimes the wrong parts are too smudgy… I’m just a soldier in the war between focus and bokeh. As for sparkly: I can never have too much and it is in this picture in small doses.

Good news teaser: It seems some people are interested in my work and they keep very good company. I’ll let you know what happens. Cross your fingers for me.