5 Day Black-And-White Challenge
This November my former intern Eric Reichbaum invited me to participate in the 5 Day Black-and-white challenge. I originally posted the images to Facebook and Instagram but I’m adding them here now to give them a more permanent home. All five images have not been shown publicly before.
Day 1: I worked with Adrienne Shelly on Hal Hartley’s film “Trust” and we stayed friends after the filming. We weren’t close but there was solid mutual respect and a real fondness for each other. This picture was taken in 1991 when we went to Central Park with the aim of shooting a new actor’s headshot for her. In the process of shooting we got carried away and shot a whole range of portraits, not just ones in the headshot format.
One fun piece of trivia is that she offered to marry me to help me get a Green Card. A sweet gesture, but I couldn’t take her up on it knowing the lengths one needed to go through to prove the validity of the marriage.
Day 2: Early on I was provided with an opportunity to make a living as a photographer by shooting for business magazines. I was grateful for the work, and the steak dinners in the midwest, but soon grew tired of this subject matter. I respect business people and their accomplishments but don’t find them interesting as portrait subjects, so I started making weirder and weirder shots of them.
This is John Cone of Dell University, shot for Emily Crawford and Patrick Mitchell at Fast Company, in the fall of 1998.
Day 3: I did a sitting with the Red House Painters in 2000 as part of show of contemporary musicians for the Other Music record store in New York. This set-up is clearly my attempt at something like Anton Corbijn’s classic Joy Division subway portrait.
Day 4: This standee of Princess Diana was shot on my first visit to San Francisco in 1987. Pardon the distressed appearance of it - it’s a second rate scan of a third rate contact sheet.
Day 5: This is an outtake from my sitting with President George H. W. Bush in 2010 for Alison Unterreiner and Michael Norseng at Esquire. We were discussing his take on President Nixon while shooting this set-up (of course we were).