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.

Best Of SXSW Film Film Portraits

March 14, 2025March 20, 2025

Since South by Southwest is happening now I thought I should do a SXSW throwback post. I went to SXSW 14 years in a row and it was not only one of my favorite music festivals, but it was also a fantastic film fest and I did a long running series of film portraits there that I thought would be good to highlight.

I went to SXSW for the first time in 2004 when I was managing a band called the Gaskets. The first couple years we went and played backyard BBQs and stuff like that but in 2006 they were finally accepted as an official act to the music festival, and not only that, but we submitted a music video to the film festival and got into that as well. Because we were in both parts of the festival (SXSW Interactive barely existed back then) we were given Platinum passes which got you into everything. We had a blast watching movies, seeing bands, and playing shows.

Fast forward t0 2010 and I was covering the South By Southwest music festival for The Village Voice, LA Weekly and their other dozen or so weekly papers around the country. I had this idea of trying to get them to let me cover the film festival as well, so I pitched this idea of shooting red carpet stuff and covering some of the interactive and just pumping out some extra galleries. I think I was making $250 a gallery back then so it wasn’t about the money, it was about getting that Platinum press pass. My editor agreed.

My plan was just to fuck around, shoot a handful of red carpets and watch a bunch of movies but as soon as I was approved for the press pass I started getting emails from publicists asking me to interview their directors and stars. I had never covered a press junket before, but I had this idea. I started emailing publicists back and asking them if instead of an interview I could get five minutes with their talent for a photo. Honestly the publicist were a little confused by the request. These days every festival and award show has pop up photo booths for post event coverage, but at the time that wasn’t really a thing. Luckily a handful of publicists granted my request, and between those portraits, my red carpet coverage, and a few random celebrity sightings, I ended up with a gallery. It must have done pretty well because my SXSW Film Portraits series continued for five years, running until the Village Voice was sold in 2015.

I have so many stories from these shoots, but I will try and just pick a few. It was such a high pressure situation for me and great training because often I would have less than five minutes with the talent and almost always terrible lighting and locations. I would go to wherever they were doing the junket and try and find some place to pull people for a shoot. Sometimes we’d get to go onto the street, but you can’t really do that with bigger celebrities, so it would be in ugly hotel conference rooms, hopefully by a window. It’s so funny to me to see how many of these photos are backlit because all I was working with was a window. I even backlit Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr .for some reason even though we were outside. So many of these are taken on the balcony of the Driskill hotel which is fine for one year, but when you keep shooting there for 5 years it gets a bit repetitive. Despite all that, I do have a few shots I love. The gallery is a mix of some of my better photos with some of the bigger names I photographed. I tried not to post more than two photos of the same person from the same shoot and I only posted my digital work. Some of my best shots were actually shot on black and white film. I would always sneak in a shot or two for myself.

The story I have probably told the most was from the very first year I did it. I had photographed plenty of celebrities in my work as a nightlife photographer, but photographing Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek together was a very next level and I was late for the shoot. Austin during SXSW was a mess and in the pre-Uber days you had to just call a cab. I was staying 15 minutes north of the city at my buddy Mike’s place and it took over an hour for me to get a cab. Luckily the publicist was understanding and he just moved me to the end of their day. When I got there I was so stressed out and by far the most nervous I have ever been for a shoot. I had to sit around for a while waiting for them to finish just getting more and more nervous and when it was finally my turn, Bill and Robert just absolutely let me have it. They kept joking about how I was too good for them and just giving me so much shit for being late. Since it was the last thing they had to do, we walked outside behind the hotel and there were a ton of people watching and I was too nervous to tell them to do anything so I just tried my best to get something. I wanted to get solo shots of them but I didn’t want to tell them to move away from each other which is if you look at my solo shot of Bill Murray you can see Robert Duvall’s whole arm in there. When I went to get a solo shot of Sissy I got really close to her and she said something about how I was too close to her, and I told her it was a wide lens. She was like “let me see the photo, I look terrible wide!” I showed her the photo and she actually loved it. Later that night I went and shot the red carpet for their movie Get Low. When Sissy was on the carpet she saw me, and ran over to me, gave me a big hug, and told all the other photographers how great I was. One of my all time favorite celebrity interactions.

One of my least favorite celebrity interactions was photographing Adam Brody. I have had celebrities be dicks to me, but I am always understanding because it has to suck to have people shoving a camera in your face all day long, but when you are doing a press junket, 90% of your job is to be nice to the press. Adam Brody wasn’t mean to me or anything, but it was even worse. He just wouldn’t acknowledge me or make eye contact. His publicist actually had to apologize to me later. That same publicist was also the publicist for Get Low and became one of the biggest supporters of the project and he actually ended up getting me two jobs. He was Robert Duvall’s publicist and got one of my Duvall photos on the cover of Texas Lifestyle magazine and he had Duvall hire me to photograph a SXSW after party for his film Wild Horses.

My favorite person to photograph for these was Alia Shawkat. She is just so god damn photogenic. I got to photograph her twice and both times I got shots I love. I shot the press junket for The Final Girls and every photo I took for that was in this hideous mixed fluorescent light inside a restaurant, but when it was time to shoot Alia she walked into the kitchen and I shot her pulling out a bunch of potatoes on a kitchen rack and it’s honestly one of my favorite celebrity shots of all time. Kate Lyn Sheil and Emmy Rossum are two other insanely photogenic humans who I was lucky enough to photograph.

I had some very quick but very good conversations with a handful of people. Adrien Brody told me how excited he was to take photos with me because his mom worked for the Village Voice. Paul Walker was really interested in my film cameras and was so unexpectedly great. Matt Lucas and I talked about the death of close friends which meant a lot to me. Jermaine Clement’s publicist told me I couldn’t take photo of him until he was done eating a sandwich and I told him about my upcoming book Dinner With Igor where I photographed people eating, and he was super into that and every photo I took of him was with a sandwich in his hand.

I got to photograph a bunch of people I knew from the NYC comedy scene and it was cool to catch up with people like Kumail Nanjiani and Mike Birbiglia who I hadn’t seen in years. I used to be friendly with Reggie Watts back in the day and when I shot the people behind JASH (Tim & Eric, Michael Cera, Sarah Silverman and Reggie) I didn’t think he recognized me, but suddenly in the middle of the shoot he realized who I was and started telling everyone they needed to check out my website. That was a cool moment.

I got to shoot some celebrity crushes which was fun. I got to shoot my 90s “Kids” crushes Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson but honestly don’t remember much from either shoot. Juliette Lewis was way more memorable and two out of the three times I photographed her she was super flirty with me which my 15 year old self would be incredibly psyched to hear. I didn’t have a crush on her until I met her but Gillian Jacobs became a new crush. I had two deeply awkward moments with Aubrey Plaza that I would tell you about but this is way too long already.

I totally forgot to mention at the beginning but one of the main reasons I wanted to shoot the film fest in 2010 was because a bunch of my friends were going. My friend Lena Dunham had made a small film called Tiny Furniture that got accepted into the festival. My friend Teddy did the music and titles, my brother did some editing, my ex girlfriend was in it, and I really wanted to be there with all of them. Tiny Furniture ended up winning best film or something and it was so crazy to see a friend of yours just blow up instantly. Judd Apatow ended up seeing it and two years later I was there with them watching the GIRLS premiere. Oh, I also ran the Tiny Furniture Twitter account and was in the first season of GIRLS but my scene got cut out. Ironically I never did a proper portrait of Lena for the gallery, just shots on the street during the premieres.

Man, I did not see myself writing nearly 2000 words today, but here we are. I guess when you have five years of boring name droppy stories to tell and are on your third cup of coffee things happen… Anyway, I hope you dig the photos and I hope one day I get to do more portraits at film festivals, because they are a lot of fun and I love movies.

Brynn Michaels In A Minivan

March 11, 2025

Back in January I was in New York for this big charity event I help run every year and I needed to rent a minivan for it. I was only gonna be in Brooklyn for one night before heading to New Jersey for the event (and my friend’s 40th birthday party which he held at an NJ mall for some insane reason). I don’t have any models to photograph in North Carolina for some reason, so I hit up a few people in NYC to see if they wanted to shoot. My pal Brynn Michaels was down but had dinner plans. My flight was delayed and by the time I would get back to my place it was going to be too dark, but I had an idea. I would drive directly to her from the rental car place, and we would shoot in the minivan.

If you are a long time reader of this blog you might notice that I don’t use studio lighting and I don’t use flash very often for my portrait work, so when I got to Brynn’s and turned on just the car lights I was deeply concerned at how dark it was in the van. I knew I could take some flash photos, but it was too dark to do anything else. Fortunately Brynn had a little mini video light and we shot the whole thing with that. It turned out it was absolutely perfect for the job. I have nearly the same light and I normally bring it with me as a backup for exact situations like this but I didn’t think I was going to have time to photograph anyone since I only had that night. Luckily it all worked out.

I ended up really loving these photos and glad I could get Brynn some photos she likes as well. This is the third time we have worked together and the second time I managed to delete the photos off my memory card before backing them up. That is literally the only time I have ever done that in the 24 years that I have owned a digital camera. So I owed her some good photos… I should mention, just as a quick aside, that Brynn was still healing from a breast augmentation so she’s got some red scars that are healed now. I don’t edit scars and blemishes because I like to think of myself as a documentary photographer, even when I am shooting nudes in the back of a minivan. Luckily Brynn respects my dumb vision and is letting me post all the photos unedited so shout out to her for that. Personally scars and blemishes just make photos feel more real/raw to me and I think that’s what a lot of you guy appreciate about my work too.

Anyway, while I was photographing Brynn I heard back from another one of the models I had hit up. I had mentioned the minivan to my friend Gia as well and she was down. She met up with me at my Brooklyn space right as I was parking. I knew it was going to be too dark in the van and I didn’t have a light for this shoot. We took a few photos at my spot but honestly the lighting there sucks so much I don’t even want to post those photos. We tried to shoot in the van after that and it really was too dark, but we tried. At the end I just used my iPhone light and those came out okay so I probably should have done more than that. After brightening them as much as I could in Lightroom, I ended up with 14 decent photos in the minvian that I uploaded as a little bonus.

So, as we move forward with this new site, all the NSFW images are going to be exclusively on Girls Of Driven By Boredom. This site is just going to have previews of shoots and then you can pay a few bucks a month to see the other shots. Fortunately Girls of DBB has tens of thousands of images on there. Everything that has been deleted from this site is still there, behind a paywall. Sorry, but blame the US government for the FOSTA/SESTA bill.

So click over to Girls of DBB for 55 minivan photos of Brynn, 14 minvan photos of Gia. They each have another full shoot on there as well. In the meantime you can check out this preview gallery below…

PS. I there’s also a 2 minute long video I shot of Brynn in the minivan. You can buy that alacarte without signing up Girls of DBB, but it’s free for members.

The Night Michael Jackson Died – 6.25.09

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

I don’t have a great system for how reuploading old content is going to work. Unless someone pays me to dig up a specific event, so far the idea is just to open a random folder and see what’s inside and if it’s good, post it. For this first ever Vintage DBB post I decided to dig into the 2009 folder because that’s the earliest time period when I thought my event photography was actually good. I have a ton of earlier photos that I will post eventually, but I figured we should start out with some technically sound photos. The first folder I opened was today’s date, but it was sort of an atypical night, so I picked a date randomly, 6.25.09. Until I opened the folder, I had forgotten that I have that exact date tattooed to my leg.

It turns out, 6.25.09 was the day Michael Jackson died. Now it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a monster, but when he died Leaving Neverland hadn’t come out and while there were allegations, I still loved his music, not enough to get a tattoo of him, but he was the first artist I ever listened to that wasn’t forced on me by my parents. Thriller was the first album I ever owned. When he died it didn’t really have any impact on me, I don’t really like any of his music written since 1987 and it’s not like he was putting out new stuff. But for some reason I just though it would be funny if I got a Michael Jackson tattoo that day. I was kinda joking about it, but when a friend from the NY Post hit me up asking me if I knew of any memorial parties she could cover, I told her I might get a tattoo and she told me she would cover it if I got it, and suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke anymore. I went over to Fine Line Tattoo and got a dumb Michael Jackson tattoo while a photographer and writer from the NY Post watched. They never ran the story…

After I got tattooed I went over to Anchor bar because my friend Josh, aka The Fat Jew, hired me to shoot a party he was throwing. Kid Cudi was there for some reason. I don’t even remember what the party was exactly, and honestly what I wrote at the time gives me no additional information. I do remember that he never paid me, but we made it square when I had him play santa for my Christmas card that year. In my post at the time I said I didn’t really know anyone at the party, but I found a bad photo of my friend SERF before I knew him and a few photos of my buddy SAME who we lost back in 2020. Going back through my archives I keep finding photos of friends before I met them, and photos of way too many friends who are no longer with us.

Speaking of no longer with us, after Anchor Bar I went over to Lit Lounge and the very first person I photographed there was my old friend and roommate Alex Magnetic. Alex was one of my all time favorite humans and was living with me when she died. Her death impacted my life in such a profound way and it was just a few months before the pandemic, which also altered my life in such a profound way. I feel like I am an old man now and I didn’t feel that way before she died. I think her death was the official end of my youth, even though I was 39 at the time.

I don’t have a ton of shots from Lit. I think it was for the party NC-17, but not 100% sure. Jeremy Bastard was DJing, but maybe it was just a special MJ night or something. My blog gives no indication. The only real thing of note that night was that I went home with twin sisters, and when I say I went home with them, I just mean they crashed at my place so they didn’t have to drive to New Jersey or wherever they lived. What’s wild is that forever I had one of their bracelets in a bedside table drawer, hoping that I would figure out who left it there. Well 16 years later I finally figure it out but I finally threw it away when I moved, and I am not in contact with those girls anymore.

Lastly, I should mention that future throwback posts probably won’t be this long, but I just felt inspired since it’s the first post and I had a lot to say, but I am excited to go back and tell old stories and relive some of these memories. Also, I should mention that I registered vintagedbb.com which will just redirect to the Vintage DBB posts on website, in case you ever want to see what new old stuff I have posted. You can also check the @vintagedbb Instagram account as well. Now go check out the photos from the night Michael Jackson died below.