35mm - Driven by Boredom

Malice McMunn Dwarves Print

My friend Malice got breast cancer recently and had a double mastectomy. She’s a dancer and a model and so it has not only been a horrible experience but she’s missing out on work. She has a GoFundMe you can donate to but if you want something to go with your kindness I am selling a print of a photo from an album cover to raise a little money for her, but first I wanted to tell you a little about how we met.

Malice is an iconic model in the punk world and I had wanted to take her photo forever but I didn’t know her or anything. Back in early 2013 I was in Vegas covering the AVN Awards for Hustler Magazine. Despite Hustler’s reputation, they were one of my favorite clients and sort of let me pick my own assignments. I pitched them on a behind the scenes shoot where I would photograph porn stars getting ready for the awards, hanging out in their hotel rooms, etc. I have done similar stories for Vice as and the Daily Beast as well, but let’s just say there was a lot more nudity in the Hustler article.

Anyway, as I am walking around the convention I run into Bonnie Rotten. I had actually met her a year earlier and we followed each other on Twitter and stuff and she had sort of blown up since then. I told her I was doing this thing for Hustler and asked if she wanted to be part of it. She was down and told me to come by her hotel room the next morning because she was getting her makeup done early and that would be the perfect time to do the shoot.

So when I get there Malice is also there getting her makeup done! Turns out Malice was there hanging out with Bonnie while she was off doing her famous porn star thing. I told Malice I was a big fan and after I was done shooting with Bonnie I asked her if she was down to get in a few shots. I ended up taking this photo I absolutely love of them on a couch just wearing fur coats that ended up in my book Instaxxx.

Around that same time I meet this guy who runs a record label and it turns out he had put out some records for this punk band The Dwarves. They just happen to be one of my favorite bands of all time, and most of their album covers have a naked woman on the cover. I told the guy if he ever put out another Dwarves record I would love to submit some photos for the cover which he could use for free.

Fast forward a year later and he hits me up. He is releasing an album of a Dwarves live radio show appearance called Radio Free Dwarves. They need a cover that is somehow radio themed. The art direction I get is they want to shoot in an actual radio station with a girl naked except for a ski mask. They want me to find the model and the location and shoot for free. If it was nearly any other band I would have told them to fuck off, but I just happened to be in LA, so I reached out to Brian Redban who ran Joe Rogan’s podcast studio when it was in LA and he said we could shoot there.

Now I just needed a model and I immediately thought of Malice. She’s so iconic in the punk scene and I just thought she would be perfect for it. This was all so last minute and we almost didn’t make it because of scheduling and LA traffic but we pulled it off. I think I had to pick Malice up and drop her off too. The entire budget for the shoot was $100 which I gave to Malice and she only did it for that because she was a big Dwarves fan as well.

The funny thing is after all that they didn’t even use any of the radio themed photos. The photo they used was just shot up against a white wall. There is a “brown bag” special edition record which has a VERY NSFW outtake from the shoot that is much more radio themed, but the photo that ended up on the main record, tape and CD release (plus a poster and a skateboard) has nothing radio themed on it.

I realize this is way too long, but Malice rules, we have become friends since 2013. Last time I saw her, which was way too long ago, I got to go “hiking” with her and her mini dobermans up Runyon Canyon. But yea I just wanted to do something for her and here’s a chance to do something good for a wonderful person and also get one of my prints cheap. The photo is unretouched and uncensored. They are $50 each, signed (by me) and numbered to just 13.

I posted about these on social media a week ago and they are almost all sold out but my website got hacked and so I couldn’t post about it on here so I wanted to do that and hopefully we can sell the last few copies….

Speaking of last few copies, I am on my last box of my previously mentioned book Instaxxx. It’s taken ten years to sell out, but we are so close, so if you have ever wanted a copy of that book you can get that at the same place where you can buy the Malice print, shopdbb.com.

Also, I uploaded a bunch of very NSFW 35mm outtakes from the Dwarves cover shoot to Girls of Driven By Boredom and I will donate a few bucks to Malice from every new signup to that site over the next 72 hours. Actually if any copies of Instaxxx sell in the next 72 hours I will donate a few dollars from each book sale as well.

So yeah, go get your uncensored Malice McMunn Dwarves print and/or your copy of Instaxxx here and if art isn’t for you and you just wanna see some dirty photos, you uncultured swine, sign up for Girls of DBB here!

On Kids, Tulsa, And Larry Clark’s Impact

Earlier this year photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark had a photography show of his early 90’s documentation of the skate scene that led to his seminal film Kids. I was actually in NYC at the time for my now fiance’s knee surgery, but I wasn’t able to make it over to the show because I was taking care of her. Not only was there a show, but Leo Fitzpatrick put together a zine with photographs from that time period and interview with Clark and Tobin Yelland. I am a photobook/zine collector, a Larry Clark collector, and Kids had and outsized impact on my life so I needed that zine.

I sent my friend Ronen down to the gallery for me, but they were sold out of the zine. The gallery told Ronen they were getting more in and they would save a copy for me. I called the gallery a few days later and they were holding onto it for me so I sent my buddy Mike over and he grabbed one. Mission accomplished. And then 7 months went by before I actually made it back to NYC, which is crazy in itself, but long story short, Mike finally gave me the zine last night. As I sat reading it while I was waiting for the train, I started thinking about how much of an impact Kids and Larry Clark had on my life and I basically wrote this post in my head before realizing I should actually write it down. Stuff like this is exactly why I created the “B-Sides” section of my website – a place to write down whatever I am thinking about without worrying about it detracting from my photography work.

In 1994 I was a freshman in high school I started a punk zine and eventually a punk record label. In 1995 I had to take an art class in high school and my mom had a camera so I figured maybe photography would be a good skill to have. I started shooting punk bands and really fell in love with it. These day band photography feels so fucking boring to me, but at the time that was all I wanted to do.

That same year, 1995 Kids came out and it blew my fucking mind. I had never seen a movie that felt real. It was so fucking relatable. I wasn’t a skater, but these were my people. I was living in suburban DC and not downtown Manhattan, but the sex, drugs, violence and boredom were all the exact same. There’s a scene in Kids where Telly and Casper roll up to Washington Square Park and daps up all their friends before they beat the living shit out of someone with skateboards. I used to go up to this fountain all my friends would hang out and do the exact same thing. The girl I lost my virginity to I had met right after she got out of juvie for hitting another girl in the face with a skateboard, trucks first. I once got in a brawl with a whole skate crew where I hit a guy with a baseball bat, had a shovel broken over my back and got knocked out with a beer bottle to the face. Kids felt like my life, only they were way fucking cooler. I knew I had to live in NYC one day… it just took me a decade to get there.

Shortly after I fell in love with Kids my mom gave me a copy of Larry Clark’s book Tulsa. My mom is not normally the type of person to give their teenager a deeply NSFW book about drug addicted teens, but she loves documentary photography and she knew I would love it and she was right. I am guessing if she could do it all over again she probably wouldn’t have, but that book changed my life so dramatically and I don’t think I really knew that until I started thinking about it on the train last night.

A lot of people might look at my work and think I was influenced my Nan Goldin, but I didn’t really find her work until I was in my 20s. Tulsa was the book that made me realize I could make art out of my idiot friends. I never even thought about just documenting my life. I was photographing bands, but not the people looking at the bands. I continued to shoot music, but I also finally turned my attention on my friends. Sadly in 2001 I got a digital camera and the digital photos I took from 2001 until 2008 are absolute trash, but you can trace a direct line from my discovery of Tulsa in the late 90s to the subculture, sex and chaos I have spent my life documenting.

Obviously I have others to thank for that too, many of them from the skateboarding world, the CKY2k videos and even Tom Green had a big impact on turning the lens on my friends. I have so much fucked up video on old DV tapes trying to emulate those pre Jackass skate videos. I remember someone comparing some of my photos to Ed Templeton at some point and I only knew him cause my vegan punk friends would buy his vegan leather skate shoes. When I found his photography after seeing Beautiful Losers in 2008 he instantly became one of my favorite photographers. The reason I got into band photography in the first place is because of my love of Glen Friedman who started photographing punk bands for Skateboarder Magazine and really helped bring those worlds together. I owe my whole life to punk rock, but skate culture is a close second even though I can barely skate.

Not too long ago I had a bunch of old negatives scanned (I have more being scanned as we speak) and it gives a little peek into the nascent stages of my photography career. I have shared some of that work, but I put together a little gallery of that early work from my late teenage years that shows the influence of Kids, Tulsa and Larry Clark. I just wish I had kept this up instead of switching to digital too early. I hope you dig this stuff.