Smiths Sunday – 6.6.10

June 11, 2025

Back in the day I didn’t go out on Sunday nights that often. There were some monthly parties or special events that I would hit up but usually that would be my one day off because there was only one place worth going to on a Sunday: Sway. Smith’s Sundays aka Morrissey Night at Sway was always a great party and the longest lasting party I can think of running from 2003 to when the club closed in 2015. When Smith’s Sunday founder Paul Sevigny opened Paul’s Casablanca the party just continued there. Truly a great party… the only issue is that I don’t like the Smiths.

Okay, there was one other issue, which is that Sway was a huge pain in the ass to get to from Brooklyn. A party had to be really good to get me to go Sway or Don Hill’s and Smiths Sundays was a really good party. But yeah I never got into the Smiths or Morrissey. I mean I enjoy dancing to the hits but the deep cuts aren’t exactly for me. Fortunately seeing all my friends made it worth it… just maybe not every week like some of my regular spots.

Anyway, this night in June 2010 wasn’t of any particular note. I was just looking for a party that looked pretty fun to reupload and these photos had some fun stuff in them. I went back and looked at my notes and apparently it was the first night I hung out with the Kari Ferrell formerly known as the Hipster Grifter. I recently finished reading her book (go buy it!) and this must have been right after she moved back to NYC after a short vacation in prison. Her and I apparently met up in the Lower East Side and just walked all the way across the city which is the kinda thing I miss so much since I moved to a place with no sidewalks. We then met up with my old pal Rony Alwin aka Rony’s Photobooth who was in NYC visiting and then we went to Sway.

This was just a random Sunday night like a million other Sunday nights a Sway but there was an appearance from Noel Fielding and his long term partner Lliana Bird who according to the internet he had just met. I had no idea who he was until I posted the photos and a bunch of people told me about it, but as a massive Great British Baking and Taskmaster fan I would for sure know who he was now. Aggy Deyn was there which was awesome because I hadn’t seen her in ages and honestly it was probably the last time I ever saw her. That’s one of the weirdest parts of this Vintage DBB project is realizing that all these people I was friends with, I just never saw again. I would see them every night and then one night was the last night and that was it. It’s extra tough when you didn’t see those people ever again because they died. This gallery has photos of two different friends who both happened to be named Dylan who are both gone and my guess is they aren’t the only people I photographed that night that have passed. Getting old is the worst.

Anyway, that’s all I got for today. I really do want to reupload stuff more regularly but it just takes a lot of time and while it’s a lot of fun, it’s rarely a priority. I am working on a couple of projects at the moment so they have been taking my attention, but hopefully a big one will be wrapped up soon.

Okay, now go look at some 15 year old photos from Smiths Sunday at Sway!

Two NSFW Parties, One Night – 5.16.07

May 28, 2025

I wanted to go really far back into the archives for this latest Vintage Driven By Boredom post for a couple of reasons, 1) It’s always interesting to see my work from before I had a decent camera and after I had just moved to NYC and 2) Because honestly I need a reason to promote my pay site, Girls of Driven By Boredom. Living in North Carolina, I don’t know any naked people and the only time I do new NSFW shoots is when I am traveling and I haven’t done that in a minute, so if we wanna keep my Girls of DBB subscribers happy, we gotta dig into the archives and I found the perfect night.

In May 2007 I had lived in NYC for under a year and I had been bringing a proper flash into the club for maybe two weeks? (*Editor’s note: I went back into the archives and the first time I brought a flash to a club was three weeks earlier to the day.) I had started Driven By Boredom in 2001 but there was this window of time when it was under construction and the new layout was going to be designed in WordPress (I am still using it to this day) and so I wanted to get used to WordPress so I started a site that just posted random nudes from “alt porn” websites and would use an affiliate code that would like to those sites and I would get paid a tiny bit of money if people signed up. I only ran that site for a couple of years but for years a $30 check would just randomly show up from those days. Two of those sites I promoted were Gods Girls and Burning Angel.

Gods Girls was pretty much a clone of the OG tattooed girls site, Suicide Girls. It featured a bunch of Suicide Girls models who were pissed off at Suicide Girls for their shitty treatment and bad contracts. Gods Girls actually won a lawsuit against Suicide Girls nullifying those contracts. God Girls and Suicide Girls were both just fairly tame nude photos, but Burning Angel was a proper porn site and they just happened to be based out of Brooklyn, and they became a big part of my social circle in my early days in NYC.

So yeah, on May 16th 2007 there were two parties, just a block or two away from each other, that were hosted by these two sites. The first one was at a bar called Sutra for one of my all time favorite weekly parties High Voltage. I would have been at this party no matter who was hosting, but the fact that a bunch of Gods Girls were going to be there was an added bonus. This was my first stop of the night. I met a bunch of girls I knew online for years and I did a nude shoot in a bathroom with a model named Charlotte who I actually reconnected with recently thanks to posting one of these photos on @VintageDBB.

At the party I ran into two friends of mine Apathy & Ariel (see photo above) who were nightlife regulars who also happened to be semi professional naked people so the three of us left High Voltage and went up the block to Lucky Cheng’s for the other party called Porn For Peace which I believe was a fundraiser for victims of the War in Darfur. The party was mostly people from the NYC fetish scene but there were a bunch of Burning Angels there and that’s is mostly who I photographed. Most of the photos from this party are NSFW so they are gonna be exclusive to Girls of DBB, but I left in enough for you to maybe get the idea. Eventually I went back to High Voltage, because again, that party ruled.

Just some bonus tidbits from the night. I had a terrible roommate for three months who left without paying a bunch of bills and this night is one of the only times she ever left our apartment. My old pal Julius Onah was at High Voltage, and you might recognize him from the fact that he directed the new Captain America movie. I had a little cameo in his first movie and it’s so amazing to see what he’s done since then. And honestly I thought I had a third point, but apparently I can’t figure out what that is so just enjoy all the photos.

There are 62 photos from the night in the gallery below and 94 photos in the gallery on Girls of DBB so you might want to sign up for that site. There are tens of thousands of NSFW photos there already and I will continue to hit the archives for more… See you guys soon.

Girl Talk – 8.23.09

April 30, 2025

I want to start this throwback post with an even older tangent. It’s 2004 and I am going to art school in Richmond, VA. In my free time I am managing this two man dance pop band called The Gaskets. They are one of the biggest bands in Richmond, but they have just about zero following anywhere else. So when we got a slot on this electronic music showcase in NYC we couldn’t have been more excited about the opportunity.

We drive up to NYC the night before the show and stay with my friends in downtown Brooklyn. The next day we jump on the subway and see some movies or whatever we did, it was 20 years ago, my memory is a bit hazy. But what I do remember is that when we get back to Brooklyn, our car is gone. Apparently we parked too close to a hydrant and got towed. We have to be at this show and their one instrument, a Yamaha RM1X sequencer, is locked in the truck of the car. Turns out our car is at the impound lot at the Navy Yard and it’s gonna cost $250 to get it out, and that doesn’t include the ticket. The lot closes in in less than an hour. We don’t think we are going to make it but we get on the Subway and get down there as soon as we can. I can only imagine what it looked like to locals when they see three hipsters absolutely sprinting through a pretty bad neighborhood trying to get there before the lot closes. I think we actually got there slightly after it closed but we somehow managed to get it out anyway.

When we get to the show it’s in the basement of the Delancey. There might be 25 people there max. The show was pretty fun anyway. These days when you hear electronic music you are probably thinking EDM, but this was a lot of supremely weird noise acts and the kind of rappers that are more influenced by jam bands than hip hip. The Tom Tom Club because their son was performing. My friend Luca, aka Drop the Lime/ Curses also played that night, but I didn’t we didn’t become friends until years later. There was another artist there who would hit play on his laptop and then just kinda run around the crowd. I didn’t get it at all. He went by the name Girl Talk.

A year later The Gaskets get asked to play this big art party in Richmond. Half gallery, half show at one of the bigger venues in the city. Not a lot of local acts could headline there, maybe us, Municipal Waste and Avail so we just sort of assumed The Gaskets were the headliner, but when the flyers went up, Girl Talk was headlining. I was legitimately pissed. Not only were we not headlining, but we were opening for some guy who played other people’s music and just ran around the club. I didn’t get it. We almost dropped off the bill. But when that night came I finally understood what Girl Talk was all about.

Girl Talk doesn’t make sense when there are 20 people in the crowd, but when there are hundreds, it is absolute chaos. I have photographed him a half dozen times and his shows are more fun than probably any other DJ although he used to have t-shirts that said I’m Not A DJ so maybe I shouldn’t call him a DJ. But whatever the case he’s so much fucking fun live.

Okay, now, after all that, we finally get to these photos that I am re-uploading. We go back in time to summer 2009 and the infamous Jelly NYC Pool Parties are on the Williamsburg waterfront, which I guess is now Domino Park. These parties were always a blast, but they also brought out a bunch of randos and as someone who was very serious about being a hipster, they were a little to basic or something for me. I pretty sure that’s a joke, but I would always rather be in some small bar than outside at festival or something. That being said the Jelly parties were legendary.

Going back through my original blog post apparently it started raining in the middle of the show and that’s why I started shooting the crowd more than the actual performance. I was trying to protect my camera a bit and there was as much chaos in the crowd as on stage. People were pushing through trying to get on stage to join the fun. A bunch of photographers were up there too, ruining my shots so the crowd was the better option anyway. Nothing annoys me more than photographers getting in the way of the show. Stop making that shit about you. The only exception if if you are working directly for the artist or the event, and even then, get your shots and get out of the way.

Anyway, the show was still a blast and after the show I ran into a bunch of friends. Man I miss just knowing people wherever I went. RIP Curtis. A few of us went over to Brooklyn Bowl for the after party. I honestly just went because Brooklyn Bowl had pretty damn good food and I wanted some BBQ but I did take a some photos there too that are at the end of this gallery.

These photos really capture a moment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can just see the beginning of the end of the short time period where it was the center of cool. The waterfront is still there but apartment buildings were going up where there were factories. The Jelly NYC parties were still happening but they were no longer at McCarren park pool. The crowd was becoming less hipster, and more finance bro. You can just see it changing in these photos.

Okay, once again I have written 1000 words for no reason. I need to make these shorter and sweeter so I can do them more often, but I like writing and hopefully a few people are getting something out of this stuff. Hopefully I will be back soon but in the meantime enjoy some photos from August 2009.

Richmond Alleys: 20 Years Later

April 14, 2025

In September 2001 I got my first digital camera, in fact, aside from test shots, the first thing I ever photographed digitally was the Pentagon on fire on 9/11. In January 2002 I started attending Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA to get my BFA in photography and filmmaking. VCU had a fantastic fine art program, but the problem was I am not a fine artist. I mostly just photographed bands at that point and my favorite photographers were documentarians not “Artists’ with a capital A. I saw digital photography as the future and I didn’t have the patience for the darkroom or the goofy ass conversations I had to have every day about the meaning behind some blurry black and white photo taken in a graveyard or whatever.

When I dropped out of Penn State a year earlier, one of the classes I dropped was the “Zone System” a class where I had to literally paint grey squares and then photograph them and then measure them with a fucking densitometer to calibrate my camera’s ability to to read zones of light and it was the most boring, soul crushing class I have ever taken. Luckily when I had to take it at VCU, it was taught by a man named Tommy Daniel. Tommy Daniels was a badass motherfucker who got his career started as a war photographer and learned to print from Ansel Adams. He made me actually understand the zone system, taught me to print at an extremely high level and really got me interested in portrait work in a way I wasn’t before.

As good as I was of a printer I still hated the darkroom and did every assignment I could digitally. I honestly regret it now because my digital work pre 2009 looks like absolute garbage, but at least I could see where we were headed. In 2002 I got to meet my favorite band photographer, Glen Friedman, who became a bit of a mentor to me and he recommended I get a 20mm lens to shoot bands. I bought the lens and then fell in love with shooting portraits with it. It wasn’t quite a fisheye but it distorted faces just enough to make them feel a little off.

In late 2004 I began work on my senior show that I would debut in May of 2005. I had to shoot film for it, but I decided color film was the way to go after taking a single color film class. We were lucky enough to have a color darkroom at VCU and I loved printing color film because all the work was done by a machine after you exposed the paper. No standing around timing developer and fixer, just into the machine and wait a couple minutes and you had your print. I got really good at it, which is lucky because my senior show was terribly conceived.

I had fuck all to say as an artist and to be honest not much as changed since then, but I just wanted to take over the top colorful photos of my friends. I hated studio photography so I would just find colorful backgrounds and shoot them outside. Richmond has tons of graffiti and tons of alleys and that was all the thought I put into it. I would take over the top photos of people in alleys. I wrote some bullshit about how I wanted to find the superheroes in people based on my early love of comic books or something. I am pretty sure I just made that up, but I guess it’s entirely possible that I actually believed it. I called the series something very creative, Richmond Alleys.

It quickly became apparent to my advisor that my project was going nowhere and he gave me a pretty bad grade for the first semester of the project. He wanted me to start over, but instead I just doubled down. I would do five photoshoots a day and just grind in the darkroom. The photos started coming together in small groupings. My teacher still didn’t like them, but he couldn’t deny I was putting in the work and the prints were beautiful. I wanted to go with quality over quantity and it was going to cost a fortune to frame all my photos so I found some industrial sign maker who glued my images to thick acrylic sheets and they hung on the walls without frames, just these half inch thick acrylic prints.

The show was fine, I didn’t sell anything but at least a bunch of people came. I maybe got a B in the class and honestly I am not particularly proud of the work, but it did really impact my photography going forward. Grinding those shoots like that gave me the birth of my style as a photographer. Doing these quick shoots, in uncontrolled environments with people who weren’t models and coming out with a couple decent shots no matter what became a signature of mine. It also made me fall in love with color film (man I miss Portra VC) and is the reason that I still shoot film to this day.

Over Christmas I was helping my parents clear out their storage locker and I came across hundreds of 4″x6″ prints from the 50+ shoots I did for the project. There were so many photos I really did love, ones that, looking back, were way better than the photos I picked for the project. I didn’t want to keep all these prints but I didn’t have the heart to throw them all away, so I came up with an idea. I would create stacks of 50 prints and sell them to collectors of mine. I figured people might get a kick out of this nascent work, and a look at my process back then. I didn’t want to include any terrible photos, so I started making stacks of “acceptable” images, by subject and spread them out all over my office. I would pull two photos from each pile and do that 25 times to get a stack of 50. I did it over and over again and I was around 19 collections in before I ran out of images. Luckily I had pulled some of my favorites already so I shoved those into one of the boxes and made it #1/20 and I am keeping that one for myself.

I had these stacks and started looking for ways to package them. Originally I was thinking just envelopes like you might get from a photo lab, but I found these clamshell boxes that were designed to archivally store photos so that seemed perfect. I wrote an intro to the project and had that printed on glossy photo paper that I had printed at a photo lab. I signed and numbered each one of those and packaged them with the photos in the box. For the final touch I found the original postcard from my senior show and I remade it as a sticker. I found a place that would print just 25 stickers for me and I carefully stuck them to the cases and made an object I really love. Every single one is unique and they all offer a look into some of my earliest portrait work, almost exactly 20 years later.

You can purchase your copy of Richmond Outtakes from my all new shop! I made the switch to Big Cartel from Etsy and there is a small chance something goes wrong but hopefully things will go smoothly. Richmond Outtakes is $50 which is only $1 per print which is a goddamn steal, especially for a limited run where every photo is unique. Get your copy now before they sell out!

Ps. If I photographed you for this project 20 years ago, reach out and I will send you a $10 off coupon and make sure I send you one with your photos in it…

The Last Ruff Club – 9.11.09

March 20, 2025March 20, 2025

When I moved to NYC in 2006 I got my apartment a week before I could actually move in. I had to come up early and sign the lease and get the keys. I remember I was so excited to sleep in my new place I just slept on the floor instead of crashing with friends as planned. I was managing a band at the time and I booked them a show at the same time just to have another to be in New York. At the show we met this couple who loved the band and took us to this spot on the Lower East Side called the Annex for a party called Ruff Club. My NYC nightlife era had officially begun.

Ruff Club was a staple for me for the next three years. Ian Cognito was the door guy who I had been introduced to that first weekend. He was the first person I knew in NYC nightlife. He would always let me in even before anyone knew me. The party happened on Friday nights at the same time as my all time favorite NYC party (at least when it was at Rififi), Trash and I would hit both parties nearly every Friday. I would take the J to the LES for Ruff and then walk up to Trash for late night there, or take the L to Trash and walk down to Ruff.

On September 11th, 2009 the Annex shut its doors and Ruff Club closed the place out. I am not sure if I was going to Ruff Club as often near the end, my friends “the Ruff Kids” had stopped DJing there and Trash had moved a few blocks northwest and it was slightly less convenient to hit both. I was still going to the Annex all the time for the Wednesday night party High Voltage, who was at that time on their third location. The Annex was great because it felt like a nightclub upstairs and a dive bar downstairs and it had lockable bathrooms which were great for NSFW photo shoots… and other things. So obviously I had to be there for the last night.

Going through these photos it’s clear I wasn’t the only person who felt the same way. The party had a tight list of regulars, the flyer read “locals only” and I cannot tell you how many people I love are in these photos. It really hits me in the feels looking through these and seeing how many people I have lost contact with, or don’t even remember anymore. There are so many girls in this gallery that I had a crush on at one point and so many friends who I haven’t seen in 15+ years. Even the people I am still in touch with through social media or whatever I haven’t seen in ages. If you are in these photos, just know I miss you and we should catch up one day.

It’s funny I am getting wistful now but even at the time I was feeling the same way. Here’s a little of what I wrote in my original blog post:

I miss the packed sweaty basement when the Ruff Kids were spinning George Harrison and I was getting my mind set on some cute girl talking to Sophia Lamar. I am going to miss Sophia trying to give me drink tickets and telling me some crazy story while I am waiting in line for the bathrooms. I am going to miss running into 24Court who always seemed so unreasonably happy to see me. She will be my friend forever when she defended me when one of the Misshapes got in my face at Bleach. I will miss Danzi’s drunken hugs and 5am rides home on the J train. I miss seeing Brad Walsh trying to make nightlife photography look like the yearbook photo you wish you had in high school. I will miss Felipe making people in line for his photo booth wait while he gets my shot. I am going to miss convincing Spenser and Denny to not hate me after I talked shit about their party on my blog. I am going to miss arguing with Jason about politics and I am going to miss the Annex. I am going to miss the upstairs bathroom where all sorts of shady things have gone down. I am going to miss Roe help me sneak whatever cute 20 year old girl I was with into the club and talking football with me when I couldn’t stand sweating any more and had to come outside. I will miss bringing out of town friends to Ruff to show them what a real NYC party is like and Ian for making them feel cool when he would let them skip the line not pay the cover… Then again did anyone ever pay the cover?

The night technically ended with a chaotic A.R.E Weapons show, but the bar stayed open until 7am with the old regulars hanging out past dawn. I had torn the meniscus in my knee a few days earlier and apparently I left around 5am because I had to get an MRI in the morning. I never did get the surgery I needed and I am absolutely paying for it as a middle aged man. RIP Ruff Club, RIP the Annex and RIP my knee…

This is only my second Vintage DBB post (Although there are plenty more throwback images on the VintageDBB Instagram) but I am really enjoying going back, reading what I wrote at the time and writing about old memories with a new lens. I pulled 200 photos for this gallery and reedited like 65 of those that were a bit underexposed. A lot of stuff didn’t need it because at the time I was blinding people with an external flash. Sorry about that, but at least the photos look cool. But yeah, I hope you dig the look back and I can’t wait to keep uploading classic parties from the “Indiesleaze” era.

Okay, that’s it, enjoy all the photos, and as always, feel free to reach out if you don’t want a random 15 year old photo of you partying back on the internet.