Clearing Out Inventory Sale

Sometime in the next week or two I should be launching a Kickstarter for my next book. I am going to be doing a nude Polaroid book (technically Instax Wide) and I am pretty excited about it because the rough edit I made is really solid. After publishing my recent zine and getting for the next book I decided it was time to organize all my old books and zines and get a good inventory of everything. I found out I am nearly out of a few items and have way too many of a few more. So here’s your last chance to get a few things and a chance to get a few other things cheap. Let’s go through everything!

  • Get Your Kicks – GYK was my first book and it sold out in a month. It’s been long gone and has sold for $100. If you had donated to it’s crowd funding it would have been yours for $20.
  • Dinner With Igor – My second book is all but sold out. There are 18 copies left and I am pulling a few of those for the Kickstarter so get yours now while you have the chance.
  • Food Tattoos – Food Tattoos was a stretch goal for the Dinner With Igor Kickstarter. Everyone who funded that Kickstarter got a copy for free. I only have 6 copies left so get yours now!
  • Fuck LA – I only made 50 copies for the LA Art Book Fair and it’s long gone. Although I do have one slightly damaged copy that April O’Neil signed if anyone is interested…
  • Same Old City – I made this NYC themed zine for the NY Art Book Fair last year and there are only 5 copies left. This is probably my favorite zine and the best thing I have done since Get Your Kicks. I would get it while you still have a chance.
  • Arts – Arts is a collection of black and white portraits of artists with their art on the opposite page. It includes a ton of amazing artists like Molly Crabapple, Buff Monster, Lamour Supreme, Nick & Penelope Gazin and a ton of others. But (I assume because of the lack of nudity) it didn’t sell very well. I was really disappointed because I am very happy with the zine. You can now get it 25% off.
  • Public  – My public nudity zine has sold pretty well but it’s fairly new so I have plenty of copies left. So no rush getting one of the last copies and no sale either. It’s a pretty fun zine though.
  • Unrealized Projects – This is my newest effort. Three black and white zines, limited to 50 copies, with a signed/numbered insert packaged in a black envelope for just $12. I have about half of these left after the NY Art Book Fair.
  • Limited Editions On Sale! 

So yeah! Go buy some stuff and help me get ready for the launch of my new book. I want these zines out of my office!

Zine Babes

 

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Lucy Everleigh For Wood Rocket

The second part of my collaboration with Wood Rocket came out over the weekend. I did five shoots for them over my two week west coast road trip last summer and while I am uploading highlights from the sets, the full sets are available exclusively on Wood Rocket. The first set featured Lily LaBeau shot on Mt. Rainier in Washington state and the second set features two different quick shoots with Lucy Everleigh.

Lucy traveled with me for more than a week on my road trip so I took a ton of photos of her. You may have seen the 35mm shots I posted from the trip but I did several digital shoots with her. The first shoot we did was in a rose garden in Portland. My friend Chelsea took us there and fortunately it was raining so there weren’t a ton of people around. I am fairly certain we got caught but no one said anything. We did the whole shoot in 10 minutes so that was fun. The second shoot was in Hunny Daniels’ back yard in Washington. It wasn’t actually supposed to be a shoot. Lucy just wanted to climb a tree. I came outside and she was up there so I grabbed my camera and made her take off her shirt and we got some great photos.

I shot a number of other photos with Lucy along the way including a set with Hunny and another girl for Wood Rocket and one with three other girls in Portland. I also have two other Wood Rocket sets that you will probably get to see very soon. In the mean time, go look at the Lucy photos over there already!

As I said I uploaded a small gallery of my favorite shots here and of course I put them up on Girls of DBB but everything can be seen for free on Wood Rocket. Go now!

Lucy Everleigh

Lucy Everleigh

Lucy Everleigh

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Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride After Party – 9.25.16

On Saturday my cousin got married in North Carolina. His dad is Indian and he had two weddings on the same day. First the Indian wedding and then later an American one. It was a actually really cool but the wedding lasted about 12 hours. On Sunday I had an 8am flight so I could get back to NYC for the Dolfans NYC event I was throwing. We raised about $400 for charity and the Dolphins won, but the game went into over time so I was running late for a gig.

I got to Jane Motorcycles for the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride after party late and on almost no sleep and completely stressed out but before I even got to the door of the building I had taken two dozen photos… and even one or two good ones. The party was packed with cool bikes, good looking people and one of Andy Shaw’s adorable dogs. There was plenty of food from Dépanneur (I order delivery from them at least once a week) and Sailor Jerry rum and free haircuts from Blind Barber. I walked in just before a huge raffle featuring thousands of dollars worth of stuff  that made me kinda wish I owned a motorcycle.

The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride features a bunch of dapper motherfuckers riding bikes to raise money for prostate cancer and men’s health. They ended up raising over $3,000,000 with rides all over the world. It’s a kinda amazing event that also happens to be really photogenic which made my life a lot of easier.

So yeah, I wasn’t at the party very long but in the short time I was there I took a ton of photos and there are some fun ones you should probably check out. After the event I went home and slept for 12 hours and I am back to my normal upbeat happy go luck self and I got more stuff for you tomorrow so come back soon…

Now check out all the photos from the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride after party at Jane Motorcycles in Brooklyn.

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

distinguished-gentlemans-ride-68 Distinguished Gentleman's Ride

 

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Unrealized Projects Zine Collection!

The New York Art Book Fair is this weekend and I always try and do something new for it. I am not actually selling anything at the NYABF but my new zines will be available from the Bad Books table at the new offshoot art book fair, the Independent Art Book Fair. I realize that is mildly confusing but the majority of you don’t live in NYC anyway, so you can just get my zines from the Driven By Boredom Etsy store. Anyway, let’s get in to it….

I am constantly coming up with bad ideas for projects or art shows or zines or websites or whatever it may be. Often those ideas are just collections of images that I pull together when I realize I have a few similar shots. For example my book Dinner With Igor came about because I just would take photos of friends when we were out to dinner and when I lined up a bunch of these things together they made for a pretty interesting body of work.

Unrealized Projects is a series of zines that didn’t end up being quite as interesting… or maybe they did but there just weren’t enough of them. I also wanted to do some old school black and white photo copied zines like I used to make when I was a punk rock kid in high school so I decided on making several black and white zines and packaging them together.

Each package comes with three black and white zines and an insert explaining the project with a photo on the back. Each insert is signed and numbered out of 50 and each package comes in a black envelope with a sticker designed by zine and button maker Emma Karin who also did all the titles to the zine. Also she helped me assemble all of these things and apparently now I owe her a ton of free food.

This series will hopefully continue with three more zines in the future but these things ended up being oddly expensive so you guys gotta buy them first… so let’s talk about the first three.

Unrealized Projects Volume 1: Who’s In My Rental Car?
This zine is the longest of the three zines and is a collection of photos taken in my rental cars over the years. Whenever I travel I book the rental car even before I get a hotel because worst case I can crash in the car. After a decade of traveling all over the country as a photographer I have taken so many photos in rental cars. The zine is a good mix of nudity, musicians and just way too many people crammed into a tiny car. I also made a randomizing website for these images with my friend Justin. It is incredibly stupid.

Who's In My Rental Car?

Unrealized Projects Volume 2: Fuck Yo Couch!
Remember this Dave Chappelle skit with Rick James? Well realized I had a handful of weird photos of people on my couch (technically it’s a futon) and decided it would make for another really dumb website. I didn’t actually make that website yet (mights still happen?) but I did make this zine. This zine is mostly just photos of naked girls on my couch but there’s also some not naked girls on my couch and some other weird surprises. Still, I like to think my couch has more fun than your couch, so fuck yo couch.

Fuck Yo Couch

Unrealized Projects Volume 3: Celebrity Selfies
This zine came about because I wanted to submit some stuff to a photo magazine that was doing a “Selfies” themed issue. I knew I had a bunch of photos of celebrities taking selfies so I figured that would be some sort of interesting commentary on vanity and celebrity and this culture of trying to impress people via your social media… but then I decided that was fucking stupid and just turned it into a really short zine. All of the photos in this one are digital so that’s a first for me since most of my print works are 35mm.

Celebrity Selfies

Now normally my zines are $10 each but you get all three of these, plus the signed/numbered insert for $12. The margins on these suck so I have to sell most of them just to break even, but I am pretty into these things and I hope you guys are too. Buy them on Etsy or swing by the IABF this weekend!

Ps. Thanks to Ricardo from Subdrive for helping design the zines!

BUY UNREALIZED PROJECTS HERE!

Unrealized Projects Zines

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Lily LaBeau For Wood Rocket

If I had infinite money I would just travel around the world taking photos and hanging out at weird motels and roadside diners with naked models all the time. Unfortunately I am not so lucky, but fortunately I do have my friends over at Wood Rocket (NSFW!).

Wood Rocket is a porn site, but they do things differently and for some reason they enjoy my work even if it’s not particularly pornographic. Wood Rocket makes hilarious original porn parodies that you have probably have seen unless you don’t have the internet. They also make other weird not-so-pornographic videos and things like porn stars reading books and answering absurd questions and a bunch of other fun stuff you guys have probably seen because so much of what they do goes viral. Also everything on their site is free and hopefully they are the future of porn because I am a big fan of everything they do.

A few years ago when they launched I was going on my epic Route 66 road trip and they helped pay for the trip and in exchange I shot a web series for them called Road Strip. It was sadly not one of the things that went viral but it was a lot of fun to do and when I was going on my west coast road trip back in June I asked them if they wanted to do something with me again and they said yes.

Wood Rocket wanted to do more photo galleries and they asked me for five galleries from my road trip. I ended up shooting Lil Brown Eyes in LA, April O’Neil at the Madonna Inn, Lucy Everleigh in Portland, Lucy and two other babes in Seattle and lastly Lily LaBeau on the side of Mt. Rainer. Wood Rocket just posted the first of the galleries and they saved the best for first or something.

Shooting Lily on Mt. Rainier was so cool and it was thanks to Kimberly Kane who had the idea and drove us up there before getting us lost and forcing me to drive. We stopped off at a little overlook thing and escaped into the forest. We were only about 50 feet from the road but it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere. I really love these photos and I am glad Wood Rocket posted them first because it’s a perfect introduction to the collaboration.

Now I uploaded a small gallery to Driven By Boredom just so I would have something to post, but you can see the entire shoot for free at Wood Rocket if you click here. I also wanted to give Girls of Driven By Boredom subscribers something so I uploaded the mini shoot Lily and I did the night before the trip to Mt. Rainier. She looks like a sexy school teacher or something and is posing in front of a painting of Mt. Rainier so it’s worth taking a look if you have Girls of DBB.

Now go look at the set of Lily LaBeau over on Wood Rocket already!

Lily LaBeau On Mt. Rainier

Lily LaBeau On Mt. Rainier

Lily LaBeau On Mt. Rainier

 

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Eleven – 9.9.16

Last night I celebrated my 10 years in NYC by heading back to 8 Of Swords Tattoo where I had just got my 10 year tattoo to shoot the opening of “Eleven” an art show tattoo artists Drew Linden and Squire Strahan. I am a huge fan of bartering and it was fantastic timing that the shop needed a photographer on the same day I needed a tattoo. Plus the gallery was filled with tattooed babes all night so it’s not like I needed a reason to be there anyway…

The art was rad, I had fun talking to everyone, I heard an insane story about stalking someone using a popsicle stick puppet and about a half dozen new cute girls follow me on Instagram so the night went pretty well. Plus there was free PBR and Michter’s whiskey so by the end of the night people were in a serious picture taking mood.

Now go check out the work by both artist and maybe get a tattoo from them (Drew is at 8 Of Swords and Squire owns Trilogy Tattoos in Tampa). The work is also going to be up at 8 Of Swords for a while so stop by and check it out and get more tattoos. And now that you’ve done all that go look at the photos.

Click here to see the pics from Drew Linden & Squire Strahan’s Eleven at 8 Of Swords.

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

eleven-drew-linden-squire-strahan-39

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

Eleven - Drew Linden & Squire Strahan

 

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10 Years In NYC

10 years ago today I moved to New York. I had planned on moving to NYC a year earlier but I was managing a band called the Gaskets at the time and decided to stick around until they graduated. Eventually I made plans with a friend to move with a friend but it didn’t work out so I signed another year lease in Richmond and figured maybe I could try again later.

Two weeks after I signed that lease I was in Brooklyn for a Gaskets show and I ran into a friend at an after party. He needed a roommate and could probably get me a job at the restaurant he worked at. I went in and met his boss the next day and they hired me as a bus boy. I broke the lease I had just signed and a couple of weeks later I had moved to Williamsburg Brooklyn into the same apartment I live in to this day.

For the entire first year I lived in NYC I worked as a bus boy in a hotel restaurant. I still had dreams of managing bands and working in the music industry but The Gaskets were on the verge of breaking up and there weren’t a lot of music jobs available believe it or not… I started going to parties in NYC to meet people and hit on girls and I would always bring a camera. I was a photo major in college but that was more just to have a useful trade while I did my own shit. I never thought I would be a photographer but I knew I would always take photos.

In late 2006 party photography had just blown up. Cobra Snake and Last Night’s Party were all the rage and when I would take photos at parties people would ask me what website it was for. I had started Driven By Boredom in 2001 but I rarely updated it but apparently I needed a place to post my photos so with the help of some friends I redid my website and became an accidental party photographer.

I would go out around midnight every night and shoot until 4am. I would come home, dump photos, and then shower and head to work. I had to be set up by 6am so I would get there around 5:30. I would work until 3, head home, upload photos, update my website and sleep for a few hours by doing the whole thing all over again. I hated being a bus boy and being broke constantly so every hour I had I free I spent working on photography.

Almost one year to the day after I started I quit my bus boy job. I really thought I could make it as a photographer and I did… for about 8 months. When I ran out of money I ended up getting a job digitizing books for Archive.org. It sounded like a cool job, working for a tech non-profit, and I got to work with cameras, but it was really closer to an assembly line factory job than anything else. I would turn the page and press a button and two cameras would fire and then I would do that again and again, thousands of pages a day.

When the economy crashed in 2008 a massive amount of Archive.org’s funding was cut and they had to lay off the night shift. They said I could re-interview for the day shift or take 6 weeks severance. So on December 23rd 2008 I worked my last day at a “real job” and tried once again to make it as a full time photographer.

Right around the time I got laid off I got a freak advertising gig. A Swiss ad agency saw one of my photos and asked me to re-shoot it for them. They paid me $2500 which was probably way less than I should have asked for but it was way more than I had ever made taking a photo before. In January I decided to go to LA as a little severance vacation and while I was there I randomly got hired to work Sundance for the main liquor sponsor. It turned out that because of the economy crash the company couldn’t afford to hire a real photographer so they paid me $3k to work five days. Again, it was not nearly enough but more money than I had ever made as a photographer before.

Within a month of being laid off I had nearly $7000 in my bank account and was on unemployment. I kinda looked for a job but mostly I was just trying to find as much photography work as possible. I was hoping I could make it longer than 8 months this time. When my unemployment finally ran out I didn’t have a job but I still hadn’t run out of money and many years later I still haven’t.

To this day I have no idea how I haven’t run out of money yet, but somehow I keep paying my bills. I still live in the same apartment and I have rent stabilization so my rent has only gone up about 10% in 10 years. The rents in the neighborhood have basically doubled so basically I can never leave.

And that’s my New York story. NYC isn’t nearly as inspiring as it was for the first few years, and I certainly have a lot less fun than I did in my 20’s but I still love it here and haven’t made that move to LA yet despite thinking about it all the time. So here’s to my 10 years in Brooklyn and to the next 10 years wherever I end up but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was still in this same god damn apartment.

To celebrate my 10 years in NYC my friend Betty Rose hooked me up with a New York City tattoo. Someone once told me when I first moved to NYC that if you make it 10 years you can finally call yourself a New Yorker. Not sure if that’s true or not but I guess I finally made it.

NYC Anniversary Tattoo By Betty Rose

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Four Babes, Three Galleries, One Post

I take a lot of photos. Many of those photos are of naked women because 1) It’s fun 2) It seems to get me a lot of Instagram followers and 3) you creepy bastards don’t seem to care about anything else I shoot. Sometimes I shoot a ton of great photos and am really psyched about them and can’t wait to get them up and other times I am just hanging out with a friend and we take a handful of photos and then I sort of forget about them and never end up doing anything with them.

Today I bring you three different sets that all have some nice shots but don’t really need to be their own post. I have so many girl galleries to get to and this seemed like a great way to get up a bunch of stuff that’s just sitting around my hard drives.

First up we have a shoot I did with Tuesday Cross that I found about a week ago. I had totally forgotten about this mini set that Tuesday and I shot several years ago. I have known Tuesday for a really long time and we’ve actually never done a proper photo shoot but I randomly ran into her in LA that happened to be right near my creepy motel room and so we took a handful of topless photos before she went home. I completely forgot about them but Tuesday is one of the coolest people I know so I wanted to get them up. I posted them on Girls of Driven By Boredom a few day ago but now you can lurk them as well.

Click here to see these random late night photos of Tuesday Cross!

Tuesday Cross

The second shoot I have for you is a two for one sort of deal. If you remember my shoot with Kate you will remember that 1) she is a babe and 2) she has a rad apartment. I even shot Finch Linden on her roof once! She also happens to have a really cute roommate that happens to be named Katie which is fucking confusing but kinda cool. They DJ together as 2 Katies which is a pretty good idea. Anyway, I went over to hang out with them and shoot some photos and I mostly was trying to shoot some 35mm film so I shot a bunch of black and white stuff of them and killed the rest of my roll of color film before I got on a flight before my road trip back in June. Shooting digital was an afterthought. I shot a few photos of them inside and then we went to their great roof but it was too windy to get anything good so we just sort of called it a day.

Katie recently asked me to send her some photos which reminded me to edit this set and I sort of forgot that it wasn’t a full shoot. That’s when I got the idea to do this multi-babe post. Last night I uploaded the whole set to Girls of DBB and because I want to give subscribers bonus content I also uploaded a bunch of the 35mm stuff I shot so if you have an account you should check that stuff out for sure. Much of it is unpublished even if some has ended up on my Tumblr. But yeah, these girls are babes and I hope to shoot more of them soon or at least just hang out at their apartment until my cat allergies get the best of me.

Now, click here to see the naked photos of Kate & Katie!

2 Katies

Lastly I got some photos of one of my favorite people, Heather Vahn. Heather is like the most motivated person I know and she looks amazing naked and she is really fun to hang out with. She also rescued me once when I really needed a place to crash which was really rad of her and she also has hot friends and got me laid once. So yeah, Heather fucking rules.

A while back Heather was in NYC and had a cool hotel room and I asked her if I could come try out this cheap little ring flash I bought. Turns out it’s fucking garbage and I took a ton of photos of her that looked really cool on my screen but were actually pretty awful. The light was totally inconsistent, it made Heather squint a lot and the focus was soft in a lot of photos which is probably my fault but I am gonna blame it on the light. I went through the photos last night after I decided to do this three gallery post because three is a good number for internet posts and because I am not happy enough for these to be their own post.

That being said Heather is really fucking hot and you should look at these photos cause they are sexy as fuck anyway. I bought the ring flash cause it gives this creepy homemade porn vibe so even if the photos aren’t technically great they are still hot. I also threw these up on Girls of DBB last night with some bonus extra dirty shots because 1) I am heroic and 2) I want your money. So sign up now or be a cheap bastard and look at the free, low res versions in the gallery below.

Click here to see my failed ring flash experiment with the amazing Heather Vahn!

Heather Vahn

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