Monday, June 22, 2015

Every place I go to with my camera, I usually walk so much I can't walk anymore and then I push myself a few more kilometers.

I was hired to photograph an event for Maybelline NY and  I had three days there in Toronto. The event only required me to photograph for one day, so I spent most of my time walking around Toronto sort of like a tourist even though I lived there in my early 20s for a few months but I felt like I was in a new place. My favorite thing to do on a daily basis is to walk and explore so it only makes sense I would become a photographer to document these explorations. Here is a couple photos from that day.
You can view the rest at my website here.





Thursday, May 9, 2013

Transgender Strip Club


I went to New Orleans in 2005 just months before Katrina for a photo convention with my old boss and one of my best friends to date. I was 24 at the time and I photographed every single thing that appealed to my eye. I have to point out when I was 28 I came to the conclusion that the past 8 years of my life since graduating from photojournalism college, that I have abandoned myself as an artist and photojournalist and I thought everything I did was embarrassing, I still have the same mentality every time I create anything. This is mainly because everything I did and do is so effortless and almost always without thought, and when I put too much thought into something I find it is cheap, but when 28 I was a bit harder on myself for abandoning myself for those years..As it would turn out I didn't abandon myself at all.

 I Have always approached everything unbiased with my camera and since I  thought all art needed direction and a purpose, even the most simplest forms of it have purpose and direction for example; Charlie Brown. I assumed my approach with my camera in these empty years whether with a subconscious direction or void of direction I am not an artist because I was not a visual architect.

I didn't think very much of the images I did in New Orleans back in 2005 just as a nice keepsake for myself. After talking to a friend at Canadian Press I sent a burned copy of the images for them to submit some of the photos into the Archive. It must of been a month later my computer crashed and I lost the images and when I contacted CP they misplaced the images as well, after a year of no images I let it go, and I had about three photos that I found to remember the trip with, so that made me happy to at least have those.

It wasn't until six years later CP found my disc in an old pile of junk while cleaning up and called me!
and when I finally got the images and was able to view them with an almost outside opinion, I was really proud of them and realized they had much more depth and much more direction because they were unbiased images and although I always photograph every image with intent of standalone they really do piece together quite nicely as a whole and they will most likely end up in a book someday that will be available @ Short Stories Gallery, or online but currently that gets backed up to the other book projects I have.


This photograph is a fraction of a second and without hesitation and possibly unknowingly, I captured this transgender woman standing outside a transgender strip club on Bourbon Street. The subtle smile to some or disapproving look in the eyes to others really completes the image I think.