Bad Party Photos

It's such a strange thing -- being an event photographer AND an awkward misanthrope.  But ever since I've started shooting parties I've realized that I'm not so unsociable.  I LOVE people.  I LOVE when people have fun, and when they dress up, and when they get drunk and dance.  I started shooting for a new photo agency that sends me to really bad events.  But I think I like shooting bad events more than shooting events with cool downtown people only because they don't act so jaded around a camera, and in fact, these people are really keen on really savoring the spotlight and doing silly, funny things.  I'm now using this opportunity to start a new series about Bad Party Photos where the DJ plays Cobra Starship and white girls wear Intermix bandage dresses and dudes hover uncomfortably close to partners' sticky lips.  Check some out my golden collection so far.

Winter Whereabouts

Ever since I was ridiculed by my peers for still having a Blogspot rather than a Tumblr, I've been noticeably less active and feeling very insecure. But you know, I just have to accept that I will never be able to keep up with this technological/hedonistic treadmill and will forever be five steps behind so I am back to embracing my blogspot blog. It's been awhile since I last updated, but quite a lot has happened this winter. I don't feel too keen to go into detail but I'll share some photos from NYFW, San Francisco travels, the SOBE Food and Wine Festival (Michael Chiarello below), and my latest Refinery29 Subway Hottie story (the most viewed story of March w/ 1.5 million views!). Enjoy.

Me and a Magazine

Gallatin, the NYU college I attended in 2007, always expounded on the benefits of experiential learning, i.e. internships. And why wouldn't they. It was mutually beneficial; it cost NYU virtually nothing, and we were assignment-abhorring degenerates that would jump on any out-of-classroom opportunity to piss take. The last semester of my sophomore year, I spent two days a week sitting hunched over in a chilly Williamsburg loft/makeshift office "building the client's social networking presence" for a music digital marketing company, which meant hours of adding random fans to obscure indie bands' Myspace, Bebo, and LiveJournal pages. Hours of clicking and human silence amongst a backdrop of competitive coworker DJ sets, hours of requesting the friendship of 15-year-old Midwesterners boasting too much eyeliner and too little ambition. This is how I became 4 more college credits closer to a nebulous, useless degree; this is how I squandered $6,250 (3%) of my tuition money.

That summer I rented a spacious bare room on Redchurch street in London and enrolled in NYU's study abroad photojournalism course. I remember picking up the 2008 photo issue of Vice, with Terry Richardson's ariel shots of curvaceous onramps and freeway intersections on the cover. I pored over that issue the entire summer, and let the images seep so deeply that if I were now to see a naked blur falling in a cage of foam boxes (McGinley) or agitated nails digging into a stiffened thigh (Tania Leshkina), I'd be transported right back to that grassy patch of Hoxton Square. I remember being so inspired and so productive. One week I was shooting a series about date rape, the next I was documenting East London's insular Vietnamese population. I remember that beautiful summer. In particular, a setting sun, a sliding silk hemline, a surreptitious gaze, some cheap cava, and the new relationship it all aided in conceiving. But that's another story, a love story for another time. That summer in London I really discovered something that I enjoyed doing and something I was good at.

Having had been so moved by that particular issue of Vice, the next semester I aimed to intern for them. I felt as if I struck gold when I was asked to come into Vice's office for an interview for a position in the digital advertising department. I remember what I wore to the interview, a rainbow paneled maxi dress that trailed behind me so that it looked as if I was floating on E. At the time, I think I thought the outfit contributed to my hiring, but today I am amazed that I wasn't automatically banished forever for looking as if I actually tried. So for two days a week, I trekked again to Williamsburg. I remember where I was placed, in the very back near the dripping water cooler, where no one congregated to talk about their weekend or last week's episode of Lost. Delegated to this abysmal cold corner, my sole task was to track competitor's advertisers, making a comprehensive list of every advert I spotted. Out of extreme boredom, sometimes I actually watched VBS's content. This is how I became acquainted with the artist/photographer Richard Kern, and his type of girl. I thought I could be one of those girls, so I wrote to him, placing emphasis on my suburban OC upbringing pandering to his penchant du jour for the girl next door, and then I began to model for him. Now, perhaps regrettably, there are questionable photos of me floating around the internet, and according to him, a large print of me in some wealthy Italian's living room. Another meaningless semester passed.

Fast forward two years later, and I was again interning in Vice's London office after graduation, sorting mail and shooting some parties, and I was also working at a bar in Dalston where all the young bartenders, unlike here in Williamsburg, weren't planning on making careers out of pulling pints. They were all under 28 and popular and fun. One guy, he worked at Dazed, and was a really surly gay who made me laugh violently for days from a single impression or witticism, but more than that, he intimidated me and made me feel reallllllly American. When I told him about my side job at Vice, he said in the most searing, sarcastic and dry tone something about how cool Vice was. I felt as if I had just looked down at my footwear and was wearing Uggs or something, you should have heard the way he said it. And so I never mentioned working at Vice again.

And so today I just wanted to share with you my history with Vice, because I feel like it was there lingering in the background during some of my most important moments of young self-discovery. (Or maybe it was a roundabout justification for just showing off some pictures of myself) Today I don't read Vice without an eye roll, but I am still involved in some ways... I'm in the latest issue! (There! We got to the point) A huge feat. I do consider it an honor, and still love seeing my face in print, especially in a magazine that contributed to my current course in life. So check out some photos, shot by Ben Ritter, below:

Best of BASEL!

This man below, in his vintage Versace ensemble that he most likely inherited from some anonymous deceased gay, and his hands casually laced behind his neck is thinking one thing: "I'm in fucking Miami. It's 38 degrees in Paris (or New York or London, one of the three) and I'm now sitting poolside with miniature glass bottles adorned on my personhood. I could not be more relaxed than I am in this very moment."

This photo is deceptive, and not at all representative of how I experienced America's biggest annual art event. Miami Art Basel this year, as opposed to last year, was a 6 day affair chock-full of minor panic attacks, sleepless nights, and McDonalds cheeseburgers on the run. I was, as my mother would warn against as she regaled me with cautionary tales of my father and his premature retirement from the surgery biz, 'burning the candles at both ends'. I was working alot. I was putting together my 2nd photo exhibit in Miami during the day and shooting events by night. I slept very little, and spent an exorbitant money on cabs from my hotel in Brickell to/from South Beach. My tight schedule prevented me from doing my favorite thing in cities: seeking out dirty hole-in-the-wall ethnic cuisine. This made me cranky, being forced to subsist on sub-par panini when what I really craved was a traditionally assembled Cuban sandwich, regardless of my aversion to pickles.

Yet I had never had so much fun. In my 23 years of worldly existence, I've never experienced anything like it. But last year amongst a throng of professional partyers, artists, models, and moneyed Europeans I was just a cipher with a large-brimmed hat and no on-the-list name. This year, with End of Century friends, I arrived with a purpose: to showcase my photographs. Within a week we embarked on planning a pop-up show in Miami's design district, and we managed to pull it off. I'm very proud of us (check out below THE Jane Holzer, our lovely guest of honor, with my prints!)

And this is very hard to admit in such a public sphere, but last year I even scaled an 8 foot wall at the Delano wearing a heavy floor-length skirt, and concealed myself until I hopped onto the service elevator in hopes of sneaking into Le Baron, the ultimate destination for those in search of the most influential and youthful Basel creme de la creme. This year, instead of access by way of physical toil, I was being paid to shoot it. Insert Groucho Marx logic about club membership here. Well it's all true, its sheen evaporated entirely. How so much can change in a year. At the club, I illuminated pitch-black corners, as if turning over mossy rocks, where I discovered girls in hemmed floral dresses slipping their tiny tongues into less-than-pristine auricles of suited men, as hands hastily raced up thighs. I was more or less, in the background, documenting and taking mental notes. And it comforted me then, knowing that there are those things that will always remain a constant.