First Week of School

And then this picture keeps surfacing over and over again in my sub-conscious. I found my son's pencil in my office after the homework kicked in.

Photo Eye Sells ECHOLILIA

Photo-Eye Bookstore in Santa Fe and online joins forces with Echo Press ( me and my kid in our garage ) to promote and market ECHOLILIA / Sometimes I wonder.

The good folks at there were super helpful in selling Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews and really sold more signed copies than anyone. Now they have set up a beautiful web prescence for the book that displays it more elegantly than ever before..the BookTease they put together really captures the arc of the book.

See it and love it HERE.

Last Spam Of Summer

This is our email campaign being released this morning.

I never really thought much about snapshots...for me they never really transcended, but this one was that, and this one everyone seems to respond to. I like it too.

One day Shannon Amos was over and we were looking at a photographer's sappy photographs of their kids: cute and coy images, kids with food on their faces, kids looking perfect, and then this mushy sentimentality coming from the photographer in their written words. Total Hallmark greeting card stuff. I turned to Shannon and said  "These parents should never be publishing this stuff on the Internet. They need to keep these sentiments to themselves."

She pointed out that I do the same thing, time and time again, just packaged in a different way.

I really couldn't argue. I just kind of embraced it, and here is just another example.

See The Last Day Of Summer HERE.

First Days Of School 2011 + 2010

EA & WA, 2010

WA & EA, 2011

Landing

Q: Can you explain what you are trying to do?

A: Oh, easy. I'm trying to land the Space Shuttle. But the wheels have fallen off. And one of the wings has a crack in it. And then the fuel is leaking out too.

Q: Do you think this is going to work?

A: Yup.

Two Things My Son Wanted To Photograph

Family vacation is over, summer is almost over, school is starting next week.

Just editing some family snapshots and I came across two image my son either photographed himself or he set up for me to photograph. At this point, I really forget who pushed the button on the cameraphone.

" Wooden Gun and A Collection Of Coffee Creamers, 2011 " is the shot above.

"AMPM Snack Packer Hanging By Pushpins On My Wall, 2011 " is the shot below.

Keepon : Robot Holiday

Thankful for the opportunity last month to photograph the robot Keepon, along with it's inventor  Dr. Marek Michalowski and Richard North of WOW Stuff, all of us juggling for space at the beautiful Bloomberg Business Week editorial office in SF.

There is the therapeutic robot, seen above, and the toy version, which will hit stores this holiday season, of course. This line from the story, written by Ashlee Vance, stuck in my head:

While testing the gizmo in day-care centers, Kozima found that autistic children made more eye contact with the robot than they did with people. Behaviors they rarely expressed toward humans, like touching and nurturing, became more commonplace. “Using a robot can be a real ice breaker for children and clinicians,” says Anjana N. Bhat, a researcher at the University of Connecticut , who is conducting clinical trials with robots and autistic children.

Read the whole story HERE.

Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger: a tangible double of a living person in fiction, folklore, and popular culture that typically represents evil. In the vernacular, the word has come to refer to any double or look-alike of a person, often viewed in melancholy emotions.

The word also is used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection. Doppelgängers often are  regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of mortality.

Anyone who saw the Mr. Anderson short film series created by Thomas Broening immediately identified the main character as Thomas' doppelganger. T.B. sums up the project and speaks frankly about his intentions and the final product in this insightful interview. View it HERE.



Mr Anderson: An Interview with the Film Maker from Thomas Broening on Vimeo.

Everywhere Art

Here I am, sitting in the dark on the rooftop of the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The LAAC is a curious hotel located right in the heart of the Jewelery District, the post apocalyptic zone of downtown Los Angeles. The buildings around me are quiet and empty, the zombies come out at night, the police walk the streets and people randomly stand at bus stops in the dark, waiting for buses that never will really arrive. When the sun rises it once again is beautiful in an old world way. I can walk to our location in the early morning light.

We ran into some space issues during the shoot and I couldn't resist snapping this photograph of the room we were stashing our gear in, dominated by the striking and beautiful photograph Spaghetti Suitcase, 2010 by Rebecca Horne holding court in the messy room.

Американская мечта

It spells out the words "American Dream".

Russian Esquire put together an elegant online gallery from my project "Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews" that is up and live this week.

I really haven't thought about that project in a while, except for the folks whom I've stayed in contact with here and there in the years since that project was alive and kicking. I took the entire series off my website once I started getting serious about my commercial career...just too much of a potential speedbump I didn't want to force clients to wrestle with. But...it is there when you want to find it.

Follow the link and get out your Russian translating program. See and read it HERE.

Kwikset At The Airport

Kind of got a kick out of hunting for our Kwikset ads at the airport gift shop last week...and somehow found both of them.

Leonard Susskind / Scientific American

I've been wrapped up in this family vacation for the past few weeks for so long I forgot I knew how to work for a living...or that I even had a job.
Coming back I realized I had some stuff to share from the world of commerce, so here we go.

Sz and I showed up to the office of Leonard Susskind one spring day in Palo Alto. Polite and courteous with a calm exterior there was a quality that Susskind emitted that she and I both felt. Strong intellect, total focus, centered and humming at full speed...I can't really put my finger on it. It's like the feeling you get when you can feel the electricity flowing thru an appliance: it is silent, it is unstoppable, its not tangible, but you know it is there. And it is very inspiring to be around.

When I left I wondered why I made such a simple portrait of him...I didn't really ask him to do anything. Was I afraid? Was I intimidated? Not either of thoese things, I don't think. But I do think I felt like his presence was so strong, I really only needed to focus the camera.

The Last Day Of Summer Vacation

Bees, honey, eggs, hummingbirds and a sun so harsh and hot you really must hide from it when it is out and toast it's absence when it sets.

Visiting family north in Oregon and getting to see things thru kids eyes that they are never gonna forget.

Time to return to my own bed, my own Wii, see California again.
-E.A.