On Leaving New York…

Remember that time Moby wrote a letter about how he was leaving New York and everyone on the internet dunked on him for days? Well thankfully social media algorithms are so broken that no one will even read my version of that letter. But here we go…

In 2006 I was living in Richmond, VA after graduating college about a year earlier. I went to school for photography but I didn’t have any interest in doing photography as a career. I had wanted to work in the music industry since I was a kid and I decided to study photography because I thought it would be a good skill to have. I picked up a camera to photograph punk bands that were on the label I started when I was 15 and bands were 90% of what I photographed before moving to New York. I had always planned on moving there, but I was managing a band who were still in school so I decided to stick around a little while. I was working a temp job and they offered me a full time job. It was for $36k which seemed like a ton of money given that was paying $500 a month for a two bedroom to myself and I had this sudden realization that I might get stuck in Richmond forever if I took that job. Around the same time I ran into a friend of mine in NYC who was looking for a roommate. Two weeks later I had broken my lease and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

As “cool” as Williamsburg was in those days, I still couldn’t afford to live on the Northside which was the hipster capital of the world those days. I had always wanted to live in the Lower East Side and I figured living two stops away on the J Train was my best bet, so I moved to the Southside which had somehow resisted gentrification outside of me and a handful of other white 20 somethings I would only see on the train platform after 11pm. Nearly 18 years later I am the one being forced out of the neighborhood by 20 year old white kids who can somehow afford to pay $5000 for a two bedroom. In 16 years my lease went up a total of $600 and then last year it went up $800 and now it’s about to go up $400 more. I could maybe afford it, but that is an untenable situation. I will continue to be broker and broker living in the same apartment I lived in in my twenties as a middle aged man. It’s unfortunately time for a change. 

I love this place, it’s my home. I’ve lived here significantly longer than anywhere else in my life and I am so fucking heartbroken leaving, but most of my work I don’t need to be in New York for and I am not hungry enough to deal with the rats and roaches and human shit on the streets and I used to wear like a badge of honor. My girlfriend does high end hair color and has made an amazing career here and she hates to leave herself, but we are just ready for an easier life even if it means giving up our home. 

It’s hard to admit that so much of your identity is tied up in being a New Yorker, but I think it’s impossible to live here for decades and not feel that way. I think it’s going to take a very, very long time for that feeling to go away. I really feel like I am giving up and that New York beat me. Everytime a friend leaves NYC I am a little judgmental about it, but when I talk to them after the fact they feel so much happier for it, that a weight has been lifted of them. I am hoping I feel the same weight lift off of me, a weight I might not even know exists because it’s so a part of me. When I moved here I loved the grind. I was working as a busboy in a hotel restaurant working a shift that started at 5:30am. I would go out and party and at four I would go home, shower and immediately head to work. I would sleep from like 5 to 10pm every day.

I would bring my camera out to parties, just because I loved taking photos but I was just there to have fun. At that time sites like Cobrasnake and Last Night’s Party were blowing up and everyone would ask me what my website was. I started Driven By Boredom in 2001, but by the time I moved to NYC it was mostly just an ad for the band I managed with updates coming whenever they would release a new record or go on tour or something, but since people kept asking I redesigned the site and started uploading my photos there. Just months after moving to NYC I was doing working as a photographer every night and working mornings four days a week. By the end of 2008 I was a full time photographer after grinding so fucking hard trying to live this new dream, as the band had broken up and my music industry goals slowly disappeared. 

From 2007-2011 I worked pretty much every day as a photographer. I was killing myself for a couple hundred dollars a night. But by 2011 party photos were becoming less of a thing and I was getting better paying jobs traveling, working event branding and shooting music festivals.  In 2012 I got into a serious relationship with a woman who lived in LA and when I wasn’t traveling for work I was traveling there, photographing models for adult magazines and the occasional event. By the time we had broken up a couple years later I had published my first book, had a ton of regular clients and was rarely working in New York, but my rent was so good I had no reason to leave. At times I felt like I was a prisoner of my own good housing situation. 

A few years ago my landlord sold the building. They fired our amazing superintendent and replaced him with someone who didn’t live in the building and was never around. My old neighbors were bought out or kicked out and the place got worse and worse. The giant corporation who bought it then sold it to a second corporation who according to their website are a”data–driven Multifamily real estate investment and services firm”, whatever the fuck that is. Apparently their analytics decided I should be paying 50% more rent and boom, I am no longer able to afford to live in my home.

Okay, so 1000 words into this post, where am I moving? Well, I could move to Ridgewood or something and live in a smaller apartment for what I am paying now, or, I could get the fuck out, move to some small city and live in a nice ass building and then actually be able to afford to buy a house in the future. My girlfriend is from North Carolina and lived in Wilmington for years. We visited her friend’s down there last summer and had a great time. The beaches are incredible and it’s a fairly progressive city for southern town and I always wanted to retire at the beach so why not start now? 

I can still travel for photography, and we are keeping my office her as a crash pad so we can visit regularly. My girlfriend will be back every month to take her old clients and I am sure I will be back a ton for work and to run my non-profit Dolfans NYC. Meanwhile we just signed a lease for a huge, nice apartment, that even with keeping the office is still $500 less than our current rent. We have a god damn balcony that overlooks a park and closets the size of New York bedrooms. Maybe I will get a boat and learn to scuba dive or something. Maybe I will start making my own hot sauce or like start wearing shorts. I have no idea, but I am ready for my weird retirement life, even if I have to get some shitty part time job to make up for the work I do get in NYC. Maybe I can take family portraits or something. Who knows? It’s gonna be interesting. 

I cannot tell you how mad I am at New York for allowing landlords to run this place and not protecting tenants. I cannot tell you how sad I am to be leaving my home for nearly twenty years and the city that completely changed my life. I feel like I am in mourning. Everytime I do something I think about how I might be doing it for the last time. But, even with all that I am so excited for my future. I am so ready to have hobbies and to relax a little and just be able to finally breathe. I am excited for my future with my girlfriend and seeing what is next for us. It’s such a weird experience to feel so sad and excited at the same time.

Anyway, this post is so much longer than I thought it was going to be and I am not even sure I said half of what I wanted to say, but I just started writing as soon as I signed my lease and here we are. I am moving at the end of February so if you want to see me or shoot with me before then let me know. I will miss you all, come visit me at the beach. 

New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

Goodbye NYC

Goodbye NYC

Goodbye NYC

Goodbye NYC

Goodbye NYC

 

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Chloe Metcalfe & Other News

It’s been a minute since I updated and before I get to some pictures I just wanted to do an old school blog and just update you guys on my life and some stuff in the future and all that. 

First of all, let’s talk about my back. As you may know I injured myself last September. I herniated a disc and there’s not really much you can do for that other than physical therapy so I did three months of that. At the same time I got a series of steroid shots to help the pain and for a few weeks here and there I was able to walk for more than a few blocks. Shortly before Christmas I got an epidural and that really helped for about a month, but it also happened to be the same time as I got Covid. I was fine but it cancelled Christmas so after I got better I went and visited my family. So I missed  weeks of PT in the process. The other thing that was happening was that even though my back was better from the shot, I was still feeling pain in my hip. Originally they though my hip was just hurting because of my back but I finally got an MRI and it turned out that I had a labral tear and some other small things wrong with my hip. Luckily there is a more specific treatment plan for that and I started physical therapy again after taking a few months off. I also got a shot in my hip which helped a bit and finally another epidural in my spine yesterday. My hope is that during the next month or so while the pain is bearable I can do a lot to strengthen my hip and my core so I can function once the pain meds run their course. 

Now, the reason I was waiting to get another epidural was so that I could time it with a trip to LA. My brother had his first child and I am very pumped to be an uncle. I am going to meet my nephew Tommy Smith on Sunday. Normally when I go to LA I shoot a ton while I am there but this trip is a bit different. Not only will I be spending time with my family (my parents are there for the first 5 days too) but my girlfriend is coming with me and it’s her vacation and she’s never been to LA so we gotta do a bunch of fun touristy stuff… mostly eating and going to the beach I think. My hope is that I can get a couple of shoots done as well while I am there but who knows what I am going to have time for. We are also going to Palm Springs and the Salton Sea which should make for some good photos. After that we are headed to Vegas and I am going to one day of the NFL Draft and will shoot a bunch of photos there which I don’t think you care about but you never know. The draft is the 29th-31st of April so expect my next update on here around the first of the month. 

In other news my NFT collection Same Old City has almost sold out. Of the 20 photos, 19 of them are gone. I don’t know how many people here care about NFTs but if you do I am airdropping everyone a photo once the collection finally does sell out so might be a good opportunity to get two NFTs for the price of one. My other NFT collection, Juggalos, hasn’t done quite a well. Unlike Same Old City, I don’t think the juggalos appeal to an international audience. I have still sold a bunch of them and will slowly be releasing more over time but they are very affordable and there’s a lot of great shots left. And lastly on the NFT front I contributed some photos to a collection of found slides called Carousel Curated. There are so many amazing photos in this, so if nothing else take a minute to look through them.

And now for the nudes…

A while ago I posted these photos of Chloe Metcalfe and Faith Irving. People seemed to love them. The plan originally was to shoot them during the day but then Faith got really bored the day before and so her and I met up to do some public nudity stuff, but then it started raining so we went back to the hotel and Chloe was there so we all shot and you got the photos you saw last time. 

Well Chloe wanted her own photos and of course I obliged. I came back to the hotel the next day and we shot a bunch. Faith was doing some other shit so she couldn’t shoot, but she did make a little cameo in the background. I have a feeling you will spot it. 

If you wanna see these photos in higher res and with a few extras head on over to Girls of DBB. These pics have been up there already for a few days. I also have some BTS video from this shoot on my OnlyFans too including a video I am going to upload as soon as I hit send on this post. 

Okay there’s a nice long update with a bunch of photos. Enjoy! See you guys at the end of the month!

Click here to see all the photos of Chloe Metcalfe!

Chloe Metcalfe

Chloe Metcalfe

Chloe Metcalfe

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2021 Gathering Of The Juggalos

I just got back from Thornville, OH where I was shooting the Gathering of the Juggalos for The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone and Brooklyn Vegan… and of course this site. It was my 11th Gathering and I took it a little bit easy this year because I had my girlfriend with me and I still managed to shoot over 4000 pictures. I have so much stuff for you guys to check out but we are gonna start things off with the hits.

This update is just a gallery of my favorite juggalo portraits and that’s it. There will be so many more to come but I just wanted to get some stuff up today, link my incredible clients and announce the second drop of my Juggalo NFT series. Oh surprise, more NFTs. This juggalo series is going to be an ongoing series with each drop having a different theme and Series 2’s theme is juggalo portraits just like this update. In fact every NFT in Series two just so happens to be in this gallery. Oh, and did I mention these NFTs are very slightly cheaper? I wanted the first drop to be a little more expensive but for the time being they are going to be listed at .2ETH.

Anyway, I got so much juggalo madness coming for you guys this week so just hold on and I will be right back. Now go click some links below and check out all the photos that exist in the world already.

Juggalo NFTs

Daily Beast: The Gathering of the Juggalos Sees Steve-O, Chris Hansen, and a Horde of Crazy Clowns Take Over Ohio

Rolling Stone: Gathering Again

Brooklyn Vegan: The Gathering of the Juggalos 2021 in (NSFW) Pictures

Now click here to see all my favorite portraits from the 2021 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.

Ringmaster

The 21st Annual Gathering Of The Juggalos

Superfreak Waters

The 21st Annual Gathering Of The Juggalos

Grinch

 

 

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DBB 20th Anniversary NFT Drop

Twenty years ago today I was sitting in my dorm room at Penn State and I hit publish on the first ever Driven By Boredom blog post. It’s been a wild time doing this, and it’s honestly amazing I have continued it after all these years. The site was started as a place for me to put all the random projects I would make and email to my friends before social media and even things like photo and video storage sites existed. Blog wasn’t even a word yet. (Technically it was, but even early bloggers like myself weren’t using it at the time.)

Before I started Driven By Boredom I had made several websites, including strangely enough, a party photo website. I would ride the “drunk bus” that ran around the Penn State campus late nights and take people downtown. After midnight it was complete chaos and I would take photos of people partying on the bus and then get the photos developed and scanned and posted to the website a few days later. When I started blogging though, it felt different. There was a community of people who would all talk and exchange links and collaborate and it felt really exciting even though I wasn’t even leaving my dorm room. I have real life friends from those days and a bunch of us still talk occasionally on a Facebook group. 

That feeling I had back then I am getting again, feeling like I am at the beginning of something and talking with other people who are also excited about this brand new community. That’s why I am celebrating the 20th anniversary of Driven By Boredom with an NFT. If you know what that is, feel free to skip over the next three paragraphs. For everyone else, let me give you a quick breakdown (if you want a more in depth breakdown click here).

NFTs are digital items that are recognized on a blockchain, that way you can confirm who owns something and the provenance of that item by tracing all the sales back to the original creation. This will be used in the future in so many ways, that I won’t get into because it would take me forever, but we are going to talk about art. The reason you might have heard about NFTs before now is because some digital artwork is selling for millions of dollars. There is a Christie’s auction right now happening and people have been flipping these things for just massive amounts of money. (Two days ago I made over $1000 in two hours selling one.)  As crypto has skyrocketed these new millionaires are turning around and putting their money back into the blockchain to buy digital items that they love, think will increase in value, or are honestly just a flex. This has created insane prices that with some exceptions will all probably come crashing down in the short term, but I think in the long term we are just getting started. 

Why would you want to own what is essentially a gif? For the same reason you would want to own one of my photos instead of just printing out one of the photos I post on my site. It comes from the artist, supports that artist, and gives you an item to collect, even if it’s a digital one. While these crazy prices might not hold, it’s pretty clear digital items have value, people have been making money for years selling items in Second Life or speculating on domain names. None of this is really new, but having them secured with the blockchain is only a few years old.

As an artist, NFTs are really exciting because not only does it exist as a new revenue source, but it’s one you can track and profit off future sales. If you buy my NFT for $10 and later sell it for $20, I will get 10% of that future sale, and if that person sells it I will get 10% of that sale as well forever. Those royalties might make it possible for artists to make a living while other people are benefiting as well. As a customer you are supporting their work that you can show off in your digital art gallery and as that artist becomes more relevant you can make some money in the process and that sale helps the artist again. If you can wrap your mind around the idea of paying money for a digital item it’s very exciting. 

So let’s talk about my first NFT. In the future I am going to be doing photography NFTs. I have already started working on updating a series of photos for this new medium that I can’t wait for people to see, but this is the test run. I wanted to create a very cheap NFT that I might lose money on, but I really just wanted to go through the process and introduce my followers to the idea. My hope is that when I start doing more fine art NFTs, these cheap ones will actually become more valuable like how my first book sometimes sells for 10 times what people bought it for in 2013. 

So what am I selling? “Blingy” digital animations of my logo. Seriously.

The current DBB logo is actually the third logo I have had. It was designed by my friend Adam Squires in 2006 for a concert film I produced and has now been tattooed on a dozen different people and had cameos in tons of movies and TV shows as I used to stick that fucker on every lamp post in lower Manhattan. It’s very mildly iconic and I love it even though it kinda looks like a dick and balls. 

I decided to do it as three editions of blinged out gifs in the style of your awful friend’s MySpace page. Why, you might ask? Well it gives it that early internet feeling when every webpage had an “Under Construction” or a Mailbox gif on their page. The MySpace look is also important because I originally started putting the logo HUGE on my photos so that you could see it when people made my photo their MySpace photo. I loved seeing Top 8s filled with my logo. It was a fun time to exist as a party photographer. 

Okay, so let’s talk about the editions. Up first is the cheap one, the neon pink one is an edition of 20 to celebrate the 20th anniversary and I am selling it for .02 ETH. You will have to pay a gas fee to take possession of it, and that could actually cost more than .02 ETH by itself, but that price goes up and down the more people who are trying to process Ethereum transactions. The “special edition” is the turquoise and pink one that costs .2 ETH and is from an edition of only 5. I don’t expect these to sell right away because spending over $200 on one of my animated gifs is a big ask, but I do have some people who like to support my work and my thought is that if this catches on in the future maybe my very first drop will have value that makes that purchase make sense. There is also a gold edition of just one that costs 2 ETH that I made just for me to keep in my account because I love it. 

So finally how do you buy these things? I minted them on Rarible, but they are also available on my OpenSea page as well. You are going to need to download the crypto wallet app MetaMask and you will be able to transfer ETH into that wallet and then use that to log into Rarible or OpenSea. Once you know what are you are doing it’s really easy. If you are new to crypto you need to buy some ETH. Most people can buy it via MetaMask, but if you live in New York state or some other places, the easiest way to do it is to buy ETH via CoinBase and then transfer it to MetaMask. You will have to pay a fee to transfer it, but if you buy at least $100 in CoinBase and use my link we both get free Bitcoin out of it so that should cover the fee.

I realize this is all very complicated, but it won’t be in the future, and if you learn how to do it now, you will probably have the opportunity to get some very cool stuff before people even figure out that it’s cool. Plus you will have already started your soon to be huge collection of collectable digital art and helped me cover all the minting fees I had to spend to make these damn things in the first place. I honestly could have put a new zine out for the cost to make these things, but at least with my animated logos you can’t spill coffee on them.

Happy birthday Driven By Boredom.

Click here to buy the first ever Driven By Boredom NFT.

DBB NFT

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Obligatory Sale Post

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and that means the Gods of Capitalism demand a sacrifice. I bequeath them 20% and now my things that I charge you money for are now only 4/5ths of their price as Adam Smith requires. I have put off doing this sale all day and I am not sure if it’s because of pure laziness or lack of sleep or just because I have no idea what to write about here but I guess I will just fill out this paragraph with these meaningless words and then just name some stuff you should buy from my store and explain why Girls of DBB isn’t actually on sale and plug the OnlyFans in there somewhere and be out. But what photo should I include at the end? I have no idea, but by the time you have seen this I have figured it out.

I guess we will actually start with the OnlyFans plug. My OnlyFans has 214 videos on it. Most of them are very short because they are like random snapchats and shit but seriously 214 videos is a lot of fucking videos even if they are only 10 seconds long.. There are some longer better one on there too and there will be more of that going forward because when I shoot new people I am filming specifically for OnlyFans but holy shit it’s only $5 a month and right now it’s only $4 because of the sale. Why have you not signed up?

My other pay site, Girls of Driven By Boredom has so many fucking photos on it, and they are in twice the resolution of the photos on this site plus there are a ton of exclusive photos just to that site like a bunch of nudes of Apnea (or Apneatic) and Ana Mercury. I shot those photos in 2017 but then didn’t publish them for some reason and then both models mostly retired and so I just decided to put them on Girls of DBB and nowhere else. Girls of DBB is not on sale because the only way to create coupons is to sign the company that runs the site’s new contract and I refuse to do that because the old one is better so I can’t put it on sale but if you sign up for 6 months or a year it is very fucking cheap anyway. Sign up now!

Okay, lastly and most importantly my whole shop is 20% off until Monday. That means you can get my book Instaxxx AND the accompanying zine bundle for less than the normal price of the book. It means you can save a bunch of money on the porn star signed copies or the ones signed by Stoya. The super limited book of prints, Vacation Photos is even on sale and there are only two copies of that left in existence. There are also a bunch of prints for sale and of course all my (not sold out) zines including the new Unrealized Projets II. Can you please buy your family some collectable smut for Christmas? It’s just the right thing to do for the holidays.

Okay here’s a random iPhone photo of Belen holding my book Instaxxx because I searched my phone for photos from the month Instaxxx came out and this was the best one I found. The end.

Instaxx

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Website Update

Hey, so you may or may not have noticed that my website was totally fucked up and was redirecting to spam. It turns out that another site on my server had an out of date version of WordPress on it that had some exploit and some shitty humans got in and fucked up every site on my server. All because of a site I forgot about in 2015. Fun.

I reached out to my old webmaster Thadd, who no longer does web stuff for a living, he is now the director of programing for a real fun & nerdy YouTube channel called Collider, and he thought he could help. Unfortunately after a week of trying we realize that he wasn’t going to be able to to it by himself so I had to spend a ton of money hiring some people to clean all the malware off my site. 

So currently the malware is gone from this site, and all of my sites except for one. For whatever reason they haven’t been able to get access to that part of my server and I am not even going to try to explain it but hopefully by this time tomorrow that will be cleaned too. 

Once all the sites are cleaned, we are moving everything onto a brand new server that isn’t 10 years old. Apparently once we start that process it’s going to take another two business days and I still don’t know what that is going to cost so please buy some shit from me, or pay for my pay site. Anything helps!

So whatever the case we should be back to normal by Monday, and in the meantime Thadd cleaned up some stuff on my site so things should actually look better going forward. At some point I am going to have to pay for a proper redesign of the entire website but in the meantime I can’t afford that so keep enjoying this design from 2008.

Meanwhile I have updated Girls of Driven By Boredom with an upcoming shoot so you can get a preview of what’s coming whenever my website is once again fully functioning. 

Lastly here’s the trailer to Hackers just because I want some sort of content down here and Hackers rules, the movie, not the motherfuckers who fucked up my life this month. Be back soon…

 

 

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Hey, I Have A Portfolio Now

For several years I have been posting these throwback posts with the best of whatever year as I slowly went through my archives in order to organize every single photo I have ever taken. I finished that a few months ago and and started working on my first photo portfolio since 2009. Seriously look at this thing… Snooki is on it. I have never really needed a portfolio, but I also have missed out on some jobs over the years because I send people to this site or my Instagram and there’a ton of mediocre nudes and that’s not exactly ideal as far as getting corporate work. So I needed something with less nudity, and more commercial work and here we are.

After months of working on this thing I finally have a rough draft to show you guys. It’s not finished by any means, I haven’t shown it to anyone yet so I want to get some feedback. I also want to add a tear sheet section and some more 35mm stuff (although I do have a massively out of date 35mm portfolio). I still can’t write a bio for the life of me and the photo of me is a year and a half old and I don’t really like what I look like it in, but it’s the only vaguely professional looking photo I have since I grew out my hair (Thanks Chris King!) I also am thinking about hiring a retoucher to clean the shit up. I hate photoshop and I don’t really want my work to be photoshopped, but I also like getting paid so maybe cleaning some stuff up wouldn’t hurt… We shall see.

I might clean up my Instagram too. My Instagram is 70% random iPhone shots from photoshoots and it’s probably not a great way of looking at my work, but I have to assume most people are checking out my work on Instagram at this point. Then again I always tell myself I am going to do this and then I post some photo I like and it gets 40 likes and I just go back to posting random iPhone shots of girls. This is how social media is breaking my brain. I guess we will see how it goes. But don’t worry, I am not going to stop taking sexy photos any time soon, I just need to make more of an effort to show off my other work.

Okay, enough of this hemming and hawing about the future of my photography career. It’s time to go look at my portfolio. Let me know what you guys think. Leave a comment below or reach out via email or social media or something. Thanks a bunch for the feedback.

Now click here to see my new portfolio!

Jeff Goldblum

Crowd Surfing To Slayer

Kentucky Derby

Childish Gambino

Coathangers Get Tattooed By Oliver Peck

Miley Cyrus

 

 

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Driven By Boredom Turns 18

On Friday Driven By Boredom turned 18. I started the site sitting in my college dorm room at Penn State University. I was bored out of my mind and not really going to classes but I knew how to code basic HTML and I spent a lot of time talking to my friends back home on Instant Messenger. My brother had started a website so I figured I could too. I had built a couple in high school by hand but they were really simple, but Driven By Boredom was going to be something I could update every day. I had never heard the word blog, but on March 1st, 2001 my blog was born. 

Over the years the site has seen a few redesigns (I have had this one since 2007 and it shows) but I have pretty consistently updated it almost that whole time. In 2003 I started managing a band and by 2005 Driven By Boredom was something I was barely ever working on other than to post info about the band. I tried to use Blogspot for a little bit but I only got a few updates in before I sort of abandoned it. In 2006 I moved to NYC and started taking photos in night clubs just because I was going out all the time and I take photos of everything. but party photography had become a thing and everyone was asking me where they could see the photos. So I convinced some friends to help me rebuild the site and we were back in business and I’ve been doing this every since.

Last year I forgot about the anniversary and had this whole plan to do a party or something for the 18th anniversary since my site is now old enough to look at my site, but I totally forgot again until a few days before and here we are days later and I still haven’t done anything for it. Not even an update until now. 

I have spent way too much time trying to organize my life and not enough time out shooting. I guess winter is somewhat to blame, and I  have been working on my new book, but still I have been uninspired recently, and I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been doing anything so long. To combat this feeling I decided to venture outside last night in the middle of a snowstorm and shoot some photos. I wanted to feel productive, but I had already taken my sleeping pills. I figured I wouldn’t be out very long anyway so I said fuck it and went for a walk.

I didn’t shoot right around my apartment because I don’t want you psychopaths knowing where I live but I only walked a few blocks away so I guess you could just wait for me at the south Williamsburg post office or something if you wanted to murder me, so it’s whatever. But it was a lot of fun. I only was out for probably 30 minutes and I didn’t shoot very much but I still got a few nice shots and I figured I could share them with you because honestly I don’t even know what else to post today. So yeah, here’s a few photos of last night in a snow storm including a photo of a ConEd worker who was bored out of his mind sitting in a parked car guarding some sort of electrical problem. He must have had some interest in photography because he had a lot of questions about cameras, but then again he was probably just happy to talk to someone.

Anyway, happy birthday my website. Be back soon with some new April O’Neil photos…

NYC Snow Storm

NYC Snow Storm

NYC Snow Storm

NYC Snow Storm

NYC Snow Storm

 

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61 Photos I Don’t Hate Kickstarter

If you are a regular reader of this website you are probably aware that I have been organizing every single photo I have ever taken. It’s taken me so damn long to do it and part of that reason is that I hate everything I do and I just get depressed looking at photos that I have decided I hate for whatever reason. I have been working on a portfolio for months now and figuring out how to make a few dozen photos reflect my entire body of work is the most frustrating thing I have ever done. It’s easy to edit a million photos down to a few hundred that aren’t awful, but almost impossible to get that edit down to a few that I actually love.

While I was doing all that I had this idea to go through all my 35mm work, which is my personal work, and pull every single image that I don’t hate that isn’t in another book or zine. When I was done I had an edit of 61 images and I decided I could make a decent zine out of that stuff, but it was just another folder full of photos in my endless collection of bad ideas I have for books and zines and art shows.

But then I realized the Kickstarter Make 100 project was coming up again. Every January they encourage makers that have used their platform to do a one off, short run project just for the point of creativity. This is the third year they have done it, and I really loved the idea but in 2017 I was in the middle of my Instaxxx book and last year I just didn’t have anything ready to go, but this year I had the perfect thing.

So I am going to make a book of 35mm photos I don’t hate. It’s going to be from the edit of 61 photos (probably much closer to 30 photos) and there are only going to be 100 copies made. Every one of them will be signed and numbered and the book is going to be square which I think will be a fun format to play with. 

There is also a limited edition of 25 books that will come with a 7″x7″ print (5 prints, each signed/numbered out of an edition of 5). It will have a variant cover and will have some additional photos and come in a fancy envelope! 

I just thought this project would be really fun to do, and super easy to execute. Shipping out hundreds of huge books was a nightmare last time I did a Kickstarter, but doing 125 small books will be a lot of fun and really simple to deal with. But don’t worry, I got a much bigger project in the works. My juggalo book is still coming soon!

Lastly, I wanted to give a big thanks to my photographer buddy Steve Prue for helping me film my Kickstarter video. It’s truly terrible, but that’s because I am awful on camera and I gave up editing after 30 minutes and just added ridiculous wipes and absurd sound effects so that my terrible editing would just look like a joke. 

Now go help me fund this book project! Even donating $1 helps my project in Kickstarters algorithm so even if you are broke even a tiny bit helps a lot. Thanks a ton!

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