The Bottle Report series I photographed and co-wrote for Vice released the second episode today.  This episode includes action, adventure, and xenophobia! Amazingly I spelled xenophobia right the first time without using spell check. Things are looking up today.

Also, let me use this blog to remind you of some stuff.  I am going out of town for nearly three weeks starting on Friday.  I will be at SXSW shooting the Film. Interactive and Music festivals for the first 10 days and then I am headed to Winter Music in Miami to cover that. It should be an insane 3 weeks of sleeping on couches and photographing thousands of pictures a day.  Updating will be probably sparce while I am gone but if I have reliable internet hopefully I will be able to get galleries up.

Also I wanted to remind you about my Web Store.  A bunch of stuff has sold already, I hope you wanna buy something too.  Especially one of my prints. They are super cheap at $50 and its the first print I have ever released like this so it is sure to be a collectors item when I become famous for dating a celebrity.

Anyway, I have pics from Sway to go up hopefully today, and I am shooting a rock and roll party at St Jaromes tonight.  It should be fun. Come say hello.  Talk to you guys soon.

All the time I see people with huge shopping carts full of recyclable bottles and cans. I assumed most of these people were homeless, but then I started to wonder if people could make a living from recycling bottles.  It turns out you can’t… but you can make enough to eat and from what I can tell that keeps a lot of people from having to rob people to survive and keeps proud people from having to beg for money. They can actually work for it.

I wanted to talk to these people to find out more, but I didn’t really have a reason.  I had been talking to my friend Brendan Sullivan (DJ VH1) for a while about doing a project together after reading his private blog. His writing is outstanding and we have similar tastes in adventure.  I pitched him the idea for interviewing the bottle collectors of Alphabet City and then we pitched the idea to Vice.  They dug the idea so we went out all day once a week for about a month to talk to these people.  We found out a ton of stuff, and had some adventures.  Vice is publishing our tale on their blog every Tuesday in March.

Check out the first part of the story here.  It’s mostly an introduction, it gets progressively more interesting.

I finally debuted a few of my secret 35mm photos that no one has seen yet.  I have been shooting roll after roll of film over the last 2 years and I haven’t shown much of it to anyone, but I was asked to contribute some photos to the Converse blog a long with a little interview.  I gave them some shots that I have taken over the years of random graffiti and signs that people left around New York for me to find.  I really wasn’t super happy with the shots they picked from the selection I sent them, but one of these days I am going to learn my lesson and only send shots I AM super happy with. Still, I am happy to have some photos up that are looked at slightly more artistically even if they are just photos of other people’s art.

Check the photos and my slightly awkward interview by clicking here. 

PS. Speaking of my 35mm work, tomorrow is t he 9th anniversary of DBB and I have some big news about a 35mm project I have for you, so come back soon!

In 2002 a UK based magazine Bizarre listed Driven By Boredom on a list of top blogs.  I am not sure if they used the word blog, because that wasn’t really popular parlance at the time, but you get the idea.  I was pretty psyched about it because Bizarre was one of my favorite magazines at the time.  If you haven’t seen it Bizarre is just filed with the craziest shit you have ever seen and a bunch of hot naked girls. Its like the magazine equivalent of a Mondo film. It’s pretty great. I haven’t picked one up in a while, but hopefully it is just as crazy.

I do plan on picking up this months issue because I have some photos in it.  Bizarre covered America’s Most Dangerous Game Show: Strip For Pain in a two page spread in their newest issue.  If you don’t know by now, Strip For Pain is a game show conceived by my friend Doug and often Co-Hosted by Porn Star Joanna Angel. They get a bunch of Burning Angel girls to beat the hell out of several dudes and if the guys survive the girls take off a bit more clothing.  When just one guy remains they do something extra horrible to him, and if he can stand it, then he gets a lap dance from all the girls.  It is a weird thing to watch.  I have photographed it a bunch of times, but if you want to see video, you can click here.

So yeah, Bizarre used 5 of my photos, despite crediting them to one of my favorite photographers and friend Steve Prue. We were both confused by this considering we had submitted almost identical shots of a guy getting punched in the face.  I remember when we showed each other the shots at an event in NJ.  Oh well, it’s still nice to see my stuff in print in a magazine I love, credit or not.  And better it be Steve than someone who sucks.

Lastly, Strip For Pain  host Joanna Angel is up for some sort of crazy porn star contest.  You should vote for her.  I mean she’s awesome, always convincing her girls to get naked for my site and she’s from NYC.  How can you not love that. Vote! (It wouldn’t hurt to vote for the awesome Justine Joli either.)

So yeah, here is a small censored version of the 2 page spread in Bizarre.  If you want to read the article and see the uncensored pictures, click the picture below.

Pick up the new Inked Magazine this week and you will find several things of note. My friend Broklynn has a big spread in there which is pretty damn hot, I have some party photos in there as I do pretty much every issue, but more importantly I have the first ad I have ever shot. (Actually I shot an add for a local newspaper 10  years ago, but I don’t think that counts.) I shot an add for Friday Jones tattoo studio. I am not super stoked with the way it was photoshopped, but it looks pretty nice I guess. Anyway, here’s the Ad.  I only took the photo at the top.

My second mini-post of today was to let  you know about my nudes in bathrooms retrospective on the Village Voice. I do a web gallery for them every week, but since I was gone for Thanksgiving my editor asked me for a collection of my naked people in bathrooms.  Despite the title of the post I asked the Voice specifically not to call it a best of because frankly I think some of my worst photography is naked people in bathrooms. I mean you have to shoot the pictures while people are banging on the door, you have really uninteresting light usually and the whole thing is very rushed.  On top of that I didn’t give the Voice my “best” anyway because I figured a few people might be pissed that they ended up naked on the Voice.  All that being said, it’s a pretty fun gallery to look at so you might want to check it out. I am sure you will see some familiar faces. Very NSFW.

Format Magazine had a booth at SLATE at the Magic trade show in Las Vegas over the weekend.  They asked a group of night life photographers to submit a few images for a mini pop up art gallery at the trade show. I had four images in the show including in the photo below the big image of Steve Aoki wearing an indian head dress. Also in the show were NYC party photogs Antwan, Jeff & Tone.  As well as my friends from Chicago Clayton and both Darkroom Demons. Anyway, stop over at Format to see more pictures and get more info on the show.

You guys probably know by now that I am a huge geek for the Miami Dolphins. While I was at the beach the Phins released a version of their theme song recorded by T-Pain. I am part of a Miami Dolphins NYC fan club and I wanted to get it out to our peoples there was no video on YouTube. When I was looking for footage for this nightlife video project I am working on I found some random footage of some friends of mine dancing at a Dolphins game I went to in Miami last year. So when I heard the song and saw it didn’t have a video I just threw up the footage with the song, posted it on YouTube and called it a day. I didn’t think anything of it until people started sending me links. First it was just the local media links… then Sports Illustrated and then my intern sent me the link after seeing it on TMZ. This is completely weird. I guess I should have realized that this might be seen outside of Dolphins fans since it involved T-Pain, but this is a bit crazy.

I’ll keep you updated if there are any other weird links… I just hope people be kind to my dancing friends…

UPDATE:

This video clip from an Orlando news station is super awkward and they show a lot of my footage…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGuGdbrQKag[/youtube]

I did an interview for RVA Magazine a few weeks ago. RVA is the cultural magazine for Richmond, VA the town where I went to art school and spent 5 years of my life. When the preview for the issue came out there was about a 60 comment forum going attacking at first me as a person, then me as a photographer and then finally attacking the idea that a photographer not living in Richmond should be covered in a Richmond magazine. Then when I was defended, my defenders were attacked, then eventually the internet wrath turned on the magazine itself and eventually the whole thread was taken down. All this sort of upset me at first, but then I sort of changed my mind and thought it was pretty funny. Which is why I am sort of disappointed that now that the issue has finally come out no one has said anything.

Now about the interview…. Any time I am quoted they are paraphrasing. Not one sentence of the interview is word for word. They did a pretty good job getting across some of my long winded answers frugally, however there are a lot of factual errors. The most significant being:

• My site does not get seen by 1,00,000 people a month. I get around that in monthly page views which probably caused the confusion. Polite webmasters do not talk about traffic publicly!
• The story about how I got the nick name Igor is completely wrong. The real story can be found here.
• The so called “Ambush Nudes” series has never been on my site. The project is actually called “Flashing Strangers” and I am still working on it. If anyone wants to freak out some tourists with me, let me know.

Other than that, and the fact that I supposedly said my nudes were “playful” the interview is pretty good. I also gave them a lot of images to use that they asked for without my logo on them, but I guess they preferred to use the nightlife stuff. Still, it looks pretty good, even with my logo on the images.

Check out the interview by clicking this link and then clicking the “Current Issue” button. My interview starts on page 31. There are pictures of you guys in it! Please feel free to leave nasty comments…