max s. gerber(the latest shot)

ron bloom married sandy, his high school sweetheart, and made his fortune in real estate. in 1988 sandy died after a long battle with cancer. some time later ron met lois, and they married. lois had also lost close family to cancer, and now they’ve both given a substantial philanthropic endowment to cancer research at cedars-sinai medical center. for people in a position to give in such considerable ways, funding research is a wonderful thing. thanks, ron.

my baby niece’s first visit to pasadena on the occasion of milo’s birthday. willa’s already been on her first magazine cover (more on that in a future post), and i’m sure she’ll be in many pictures still to come.

at some point yesterday, stuck in traffic driving home from visiting mario and ali, i realized that i’ve been photographing them off an on for ten years. that’s a whole decade. i tried to think of who else - aside from maybe my family - i had spent that many years photographing. there aren’t many people. certainly not in the same way. i met them both when they were eight years old. i’m amazed they’re not sick of me and my cameras and my stupid questions by now.

when i got to mario’s house he had the hearts book out on the coffee table in the living room. he said he likes to show it to the girls he brings home. apparently that works for him. glad to be of service, mario. i try to be helpful.

anyway, yeah. ten years. and the last real picture of 2009, and of this decade. seems fitting to me. thanks, guys. for everything.

photo by sydney taylor

back in september i got an email from sydney. sydney is 15 years old, a congenital heart patient, like me. unlike me, sydney had her first pacemaker implanted when she was only 15 hours old (i was eight (years)). she said, “I am saving money to buy your book because it is the most incredible thing I have ever seen!! . . . when I get my hands on a copy I will carry it around with me everywhere and show everyone!!!”

i told sydney i’d send her an autographed copy of the book if she promised to tell me what she thought of it, and send me a picture of the book in her house. the review arrived a couple weeks ago, the picture arrived last week. thanks, sydney. merry christmas.

the charming and incomparable maggie soladay has written about me for the december “editor’s choice” column on PDN’s photoserve website! thanks, maggie!

see the article here.

last week kim and tashena visited me. tashena lives in san diego now, where she takes amazingly lovely, ethereal and poetic pictures. kim was visiting from tucson.

kim is micah’s father. tashena is micah’s sister.

it’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since the last time i saw micah, almost ten years since he died. it suddenly struck me that micah would’ve been twenty-one years old this past summer. somehow this realization hit me kind of hard. maybe it’s the fact that we’re passing into a new decade in a couple of weeks, maybe just a realization that all these kids don’t stay kids for very long. in my head micah will forever be 11 years old, the only age at which i knew him. i wonder what he’s like in the memories of tashena and kim?

photographing micah was one of the first times i remember thinking to myself that a picture i took could actually be good for something, could actually mean more than it seemed. in the picture that kim is holding above i remember being especially struck by this. micah was home from school that day with a respiratory infection. at the time this photo was taken it was just micah and me in the house. he was sleeping most of the time, and i remember listening to the sound of his breathing, which was more deliberate and more labored than anything i had ever heard before. every so often he’d wake up and we’d talk for a bit, or take a few pictures, and then he would doze off again.

micah passed away on april 16th of 2000. he was always the coolest guy in the room.

i just found out late last week that the story i shot for the american lawyer magazine earlier this year on anthony harris won the gold in the 2009 ozzie awards for “best use of photography” in a magazine under 100,000 circulation! my deepest thanks to maggie, joan and martin at ALM for taking a risk and going with a very unusual choice for the feature spread.

see my original post on anthony here.

read the story on anthony here - it’s an amazing story.

see other 2009 ozzie award winners here. the ozzie awards bills iself as “the biggest contest in magazine design”, so that’s not too shabby.