Ellen Stagg & Laura Desiree Magazine Party – 4.5.23
I haven’t photographed an party in ages and when my friend Ellen Stagg hit me up about shooting an event for her the day I came back from two weeks on the West Coast I was a little hesitant for a number of reasons. First one is of course my back injury and doing event work is really tough, the second was that I just don’t really shoot with a flash anymore and I knew I would need to if I was going to shoot her party and the third was that the event was to celebrate her photo making the cover of a certain magazine that once threw me into a lawsuit that I had almost nothing to do with but still cost me tens of thousands of dollars to get out of. Still, I love Ellen and I wanted to support her and as I have been going through my archives for my Vintage Driven By Boredom instagram I have been really missing shooting parties which is not something I ever expected. So I said yes to the gig and broke out my old DSLR and shot the party like I would have a decade ago. I was worried the shots wouldn’t be great so I actually wouldn’t let Ellen pay me until the end of the night because I wanted to make sure I a) didn’t fuck up and b) was able to shoot the whole thing without my back falling apart, but an hour in I realized that I still kinda knew what I was doing and I was able to take enough breaks to make it through despite some pretty excruciating pain at times. Anyway, this whole paragraph is just me complaining about stuff so let’s get into the actual party!
The party was pretty much a book signing with Ellen and cover model Laura Desiree selling magazines and signing them all night. You’d think that would be a pretty boring thing to shoot, but I knew better than that. The party was at The Museum of Sex’s event area, Super Funland which is a mix between a carnival, an art exhibit and the Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange. There is a slide from upstairs that people can take that shoots them out of what is essentially a giant vagina into the middle of the party which was honestly delightful. There was also a dancer named Ruby Quinn who absolutely killed it doing killer pole tricks and giving me something to photograph all night. Also Ellen and Laura are tremendous babes and have a lot of fun to photograph friends which made for easy work on my end. Got to see some old friends and finally met Connie Perignon who I have known via the internets for a couple of years, but never actually ran into IRL. Someone did try and fight me for absolutely no reason in the middle of the party, but honestly I kinda miss that kinda thing too. A younger me would have done some stupid shit, but I am an adult now so I just went back to taking photos.
Anyway, the whole thing was a blast and I really appreciate Ellen and Laura bringing me out and I hope I can shoot some more parties in the future. I didn’t realize I missed it. Also hopefully I met some people that I can photograph in the future, and I only mention this as an excuse to promote my OnlyFans. Listen, a man has gotta eat. I also should mention that this gallery is once again on Flickr because my website is just permanently broken and I haven’t really figured out a good solution for that, but hopefully I will in the not too distant future, especially if I get back into shooting nightlife a little bit. At least the photos are in higher resolution over there…
