I’m flying out to Annapolis tomorrow for a wedding shoot, so I’m busy charging batteries, running last minute errands to get travel-sized toiletries (grrrr. Stupid TSA rules), and emptying CF cards. I’ve been trying to spend a little bit of time each day out in the garden, but won’t bore you with too many flower photos, I promise.
I’ve wanted to photograph Lee ever since he showed me his recently completed tattoo at a friend’s housewarming party. He designed it himself, and the artwork fits his personality perfectly. You can check out more of Lee’s art and character designs at his personal art site here.
I thought about my tattoo for about seven years during which I prototyped out various designs by way of placing them on characters that I was designing for various video games at the time. From a design stand point the tattoo is an amalgamation of my influences as an artist. I’m largely a digital artist a love affair with art noveau, high contrast design work, technology, and things that go bump in the night. The application of the tattoo itself was done by the wonderful Idexa Stern at Black and Blue Tattoo who not only did an amazing job of making sure everything lined up and sat correctly on my body but also made the three months we spent together working on the tattoo more of a journey than a mere technical process.
While the pen nib on my right arm is the only directly symbolic portion of the tattoo it relates to who I am on several levels. The piece is largely hidden on a day to day basis because in many ways I’m a private person and I like being able to choose where and when and with whom I share various parts of myself. I love art and music that is layered and complex and I love that I now have this hidden layer that only people who are close to me know about. I realize that having photos of my tattoos on the internet runs somewhat counter to this idea but that highlights two other aspects of the tattoo that are important to me. The first is that a couple years ago the idea of shirtless pictures of me on the internet would have been absolutely mortifying so I love the fact that having them has made me more comfortable with myself. Secondly, I think it’s important to remember that the rules we live by are our own creation and as such we can change them and break them whenever we see fit.
Sometimes everything just comes together, the weather, the location, and the model. This started out a simple headshot session but we decided to push it further and headed into the park to enjoy the perfect spring day. Believe it or not, this whole shoot only took about an hour.
Jamaica’s an extremely talented artist, and a longtime friend. We’ve begun collaborating on a super secret project, more about that as it develops.
I walked into the bedroom to this scene of mind-melting adorable… both of them curled up on their favorite blanked (ten dollars from ikea – best investment ever) and engaging in an epic mutual grooming session. The real miracle? This didn’t end in a fight.
Been very busy booking weddings, shooting band photos, and getting my backup system fully in place. It’s impacted the blogging a bit, but don’t worry, lots of great stuff is right ahead on the horizon.
My good friends Nick and Ingrid were married last summer in San Anselmo, and while they opted not to book any of their friends in an official photographer capacity, I couldn’t resist snapping a few candid images of their beautiful wedding.
Paris is beautiful, sprawling, elegant, dirty, busy, loaded with history and covered in graffiti. Everything I like in a city. My french is embarrassingly bad – I felt too ashamed in most instances to attempt to speak it. However, people were very kind and only laughed at us a little while helping us out a lot.
Yup. I’m a tourist.
We took the Eurostar over from the UK, checked into our hotel and then hit the streets in search of a vegetarian restaurant. They do exist in France, promise. We stayed at Mama Shelter, near the Gambetta Metro stop, it’s a terrific hotel and I recommend it highly. Very cool modern interiors (with a black wall!), free Wifi in the rooms, flat screen tv, and high quality complimentary soaps in the bathrooms. The building is made of concrete and our room was the quietest hotel room I’ve ever had. If you’re a light sleeper such as myself, you understand what a blessing this is while traveling.
Click below for more Paris travel porn…
My chest piece was done in one sitting by my friend Jason Angst at the Brew City Tattoo Convention in 2009 (He won tattoo of the day for it). I got this tattoo at a time when a lot of friends of mine were going through a really hard time related to family problems and state repression and various other legal troubles. The quote across the banner is “we are the birds of a coming storm” which is a paraphrasing of the infamous words of the Haymarket martyr, August Spies. Spies was an anarchist agitator in Chicago who was sentenced to death for his fiery views and convictions. His last words before being hung were “the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” In a way, thinking about his words was a way for me to deal with the difficulties my friends and I were going through and to remember that though we felt alone at times, a whole redemptive storm would follow someday.
Medusa
Also by Jason Angst. Medusa is often mythologized as a symbol of femme / feminist vengeance against patriarchal power. When I got this, most of the female assigned people in my life (including my mother) were dealing with bad behavior of men in various ways and capacities. People I thought I could trust, or who were maybe positive examples of how to not be misogynist were proving me wrong left and right. This affected me in a pretty serious way and I had to re-evaluate a lot of the ways I thought about gendered violence and resistance to it. I got a tattoo of medusa as a bit of a solidarity gesture with everyone in my life dealing with violence or pain because of their place in our gendered world. The tattoo is based on a painting by Caravaggio.
Divine:
My first and dearest tattoo, by Gifford Kasen . “Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!”
Thanks Devin!
Live in the Sf bay area and have some ink you’d like to show off, or are a tattoo artist who just finished a really cool piece? Contact me about a shoot. I’m always looking for people with creative and interesting tats to work with.