i met dana in the summer of 2001, at a party at peter gilstrap’s house. it was a fluke that i was even at this party, i really try to avoid parties as much as i can. when i do have to go to a party i generally stand in the corner and read the person’s books, or stand in the kitchen and try to help cook something. anything to avoid talking to the inebriated. anyway, dana was standing in the kitchen, too. at the time dana worked as the associate art director of the LA weekly. i gave him my card, and he passed it along to debra, the photo editor. through debra, i met bill, and through bill i met dave. so, peter, dana, debra, bill and dave. five good, solid, talented, smart people. from one party. i guess it sometimes pays to go to parties.

dana then became the art director of LA citybeat, which just went belly up a couple weeks ago, sadly. they paid horribly and  had a bad habit of assigning things at 5pm on a friday that were due on the following monday. honestly, sometimes we’d just avoid answering the phone late on a friday afternoon so our weekend wouldn’t be ruined. all that being said, i really enjoyed working for citybeat – the subjects were often great, and dana’s layouts were always stellar. i started my career working for alt-newsweeklies, they’ve always been good to me, and i’ve always appreciated the experience.

dana was kind enough to make me a groomsman at his wedding a couple years ago, and it wasn’t even a trick to get me to take pictures. that’s the mark of a decent guy, right there. dana also used to live with a possum. or, near a possum. he also, at one point, had a pot bellied pig named “bacon”, but sadly that was in a different state.

dana was smart and got out of citybeat before the publishing trouble really hit. he decided he wanted to really learn how to draw, even though by anyone’s estimation he was already a tremendous illustrator. so he enrolled in art center, and now he’s working his ass off, beating the pants off the young kids there who think they’re hot shit. shhh, dana. don’t tell anyone you’re an art director.

dana was over at my house printing his final project for school on my printer. despite what the picture below looks like, he and milo really got along famously. no milo was injured in the making of these photographs.

see dana’s stuff here.

dana’s good people. you should all hire him to illustrate and design things. except when you should be hiring a photographer, that is. then you should call me.

last week i had a shoot that took place in a zoological laboratory. i’m not sure if the place was really appropriate to the subject, or if it was just available and really cool to be in. maybe a mix of the two. it was more interesting than any of our other options at the time, that’s for sure. i’d never been in a zoology lab before so it was kind of fascinating. as usual i’m impressed and amazed at the level of organization that goes on in places like this. i wish scientists could come and organize my office, but with less dead things or radiation or advanced mathematics.

my deepest sincere thanks to dr. john hafner who runs this lab for being so gracious in allowing us inside. i hope no permanent damage was caused. i really love listening to scientists talk about what they do, and to some extent i really love listening to anyone who’s passionate about their work. i think i sometimes confuse scientists because i tend to fixate on elements that are, to them, somewhat incidental. for example in this zoology lab i was really taken with the little tags used to mark all the specimens. they’re all written out by hand in felt tip permanent marker, even in this age of printers and computers. everything written out by hand, and it lends an old-time sort of aesthetic that’s really appealing. also it makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish immediately between specimens collected recently and those that are eighty years old.

paul was very impressed by a different thing. this involved pointing and exclaiming the following phrase like a little girl: “pickled bats!” (see above).

here’s corporal bennett, sitting in for a test shot that isn’t anything like what we ended up doing. sometimes it’s a drag to have a great location that’s wrong for the subject.

today winona lost a long fight with kidney failure. i’d been giving her subcutaneous fluids every other day for a year and a half, but over the last month she deteriorated quickly. this morning i made the difficult decision to end her suffering. it was impossibly sad to see her decline so much, she could barely do more than lift her head up, she hadn’t eaten for five days, though to the very end she still had her wits about her, had the same incredible presence and personality that kept me company for almost two decades. with her around i never really felt alone, it always felt like i had a partner in crime. most of the time it felt like she took better care of me than i did of her, but i tried. we were way too attached to each other, i’ll admit.

winona was seventeen years, two months and ten days old. the things she gave me were immeasurable.

goodbye, ‘nona.

i’ll be honest, i couldn’t care less about sports. never did. never had any interest in watching sports or participating in them. i certainly never had any particular aptitude for any sport, though i did waste practically my entire freshman year of college playing ping pong, and was pretty good at it there for a while. i’ve been to one basketball game in my life, and three dodgers games. i can’t remember a single thing that happened during any of those events, save for the following:

1) the first dodger game i went to i spent mostly watching the crowd and ignoring the game. for the brief period of time i actually looked at what was going on on the field i saw two players run for a fly ball, slam into each other and fall down. i thought, ‘hey, baseball might not suck after all’.

2) at the last dodger game i went to my buddy alex managed to squirt mustard all over the ankles of the woman sitting in the row in front of us. her very large boyfriend was not pleased, and all of poor alex’s friends (myself including) immediately abandoned any shred of loyalty by pointing to him as the culprit. nobody was ultimately hurt.

3) at some point during the only basketball game i went to as a young kid – i think it might have been at madison square garden (do they play basketball there?) – i managed to get an earache and spent the rest of the time crying.

still. . .i have a soft spot for the summer olympic games. i’ll watch nearly anything during the summer games, though this year i was a little disappointed that i could never seem to find televised ping pong, and there was way too much volleyball which is really boring. gymnastics, though, is my favorite. this is mostly because i believe that gold medal athletes should be able to do things that aren’t even in the realm of possibility for normal humans. olympic level gymnastics are about as close as humans get to actually being spider man. that shit is amazing.

everybody knows, though, that this year the olympics were dominated by swimming, mostly because of michael phelps. so in the middle of all this olympic swimming fervor i got an assignment to photograph shirley babashoff.

shirley has won eight olympic medals in women’s swimming – two gold, six silver, in the 1972 and 1976 games. unfortunately, though, shirley is remembered mostly for something else that happened at the ’76 montreal games. as she tells it, her and her teammates went into the locker room and were startled to hear what appeared to be men’s voices. investigating the noise she found that it was coming from the east german women’s swim team. when the east germans went on to dominate the games, shirley called them out for doping. this charge turned out to be accurate, but before that shirley was lambasted by the press as being a sore loser and was nicknamed “surly shirley”.

now shirley lives in fountain valley, with her son and her dog, leroy. leroy is a brussells griffon, and shirley said she got him after seeing a similar dog in the movie “as good as it gets”. these days shirley is a letter carrier with the post office, and doesn’t really swim anymore. she says she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about her olympic career, being that it’s been about thirty years since she swam competitively. she seemed proud of her tomato garden, and even gave me a bag full of really delicious plum tomatoes to take home.

my thanks to mindy benham at orange coast magazine, and to the always talented kevin miyazaki for the referral.

(my thanks to joey gu for noticing a typo above, which has now been fixed.)

growing up i would’ve said i was a dog person. really. but winona is the cat of my life. amazing to think i got her seventeen years ago, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. she’s lived with me the past twelve years straight, through dog attacks, unfriendly room-mates, two lovely girlfriends (one allergic, one as smitten with ‘nona as she was with me)  and several different apartments. once long ago, when i had a darkroom, i could’ve sworn that winona was addicted to fixer. those who know me know that i’m irrationally devoted to her, and i like her more than most people i meet. also, she depends on me for survival, which most people i meet don’t do. that kind of helps with the attachment.

now, at seventeen, winona is hanging on, in a pretty advanced stage of kidney failure. i give her 100 cc’s of saline through an IV every other day. she’s surprisingly patient with this, and i’ve been doing it for over a year. so far the veterinarian seems amazed she’s still alive and kicking. every day she makes me smile, especially on days when nothing else does. happy birthday, kiddo.

the above pic was taken with the glorious iphone 1.0, in mid august. the pictures below were taken today, on her birthday, in an attempt to do something more formal. cats are not terribly into being cooperative for studio pictures. thanks to mark miller for cat wrangling, even though it was an uphill battle. these aren’t quite what i was hoping for but i was afraid we were starting to stress her out, which is bad on the kidneys.

and my thanks, also, to the james watson bobble head doll for standing in.

i teach a portrait photography class at a college in orange county, california. very often students will neglect to turn in assignments. generally, the excuses are as wild and exotic as saying “uh. . . the printer was broken”, or “i don’t have a car” or simply staring blankly and sort of half-shrugging. none of these excuses make much of an impression, and frankly, then there’s less for me to grade. every once in a while, though, someone will have a really good excuse. i’m sorry to say this one didn’t happen to me, but to my buddy john thawley who teaches at santa monica college.

here’s the excuse (and accompanying pictures. it’s important to note that the student had the wherewithal not only to photograph the squirrel who attacked her, but also the resulting injury and treatment process. that gets an “A” in my book. (pictures related to the incident copyright by toni ciaravino, reprinted with permission):

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From: Toni
Date: 8 October 2007 6:25:30 PM
To: john thawley
Subject: absence from class tonight

i was feeding and photographing squirrels in the park today. this cute squirrel mistook my finger for a pecan. it chomped down so hard on my finger that it was pulling me. it would not let go. finally my husband scared it off. then we went to urgent care and i got a tetanus shot and antibiotics. we just got home and i am not going to make it to class–especially considering the pain i’m in right now.

i will not be bringing you my assignment. i am in a lot of pain and cannot drive. that tetanus shot really messed up my arm. maybe there’s not enough muscle or fat there. it’s pretty excruciating. truth be told, i was at the park finishing my assignment when the ferocious beast attacked. i didn’t even get to my homework shots, so it’s not even done. i would shoot it today but i can’t hold my camera and the finger that was bitten is my trigger finger.

i am an idiot.

please feel free to laugh and share this with the class.

toni ciaravino

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