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.

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.

on september 23rd at 12:36pm my niece, willamina, was born. so i’m now officially the coolest uncle in the room. (okay, the only uncle in the room.) here are pictures from her first day of life – 7 lbs, 13 oz, chubby and healthy and beautiful! happy birthday, guppy!

congratulations to my brother, james, and my sister-in-law, emiko!

my brother and his wife are having a baby daughter in september. my father, who lives in new york, has not seen them since before emiko got pregnant, so i thought it’d be nice to make a video for him for father’s day. also, i figure it serves to mark my brother’s first “official” father’s day – or is that a pre-father’s day? either way, i’m to be an uncle soon and as such it’s my right to subject everyone to time in front of the camera. at the moment, the leading contender for baby names falls to “willamina”. so here’s my brother james and emiko and willa – t-minus three months.

of course, my brother approaches impending fatherhood with his usual humility.

and just in case it’s unclear, that phrase he says at the very end is “chocolate cake and fred segal’s.”

click the play button below.

i met vic one day by accident. i was taking pictures at the research lab where she works, it was the summer, it was hot, and i was lugging my gear around by myself. she was standing outside smoking a cigarette. i had a long list of subjects i was supposed to shoot that week, but i forgot all about them. she wasn’t on my list. i started moving equipment slower, hoping to strike up a conversation. she said hello, and i said hello, and then – as i have many times since – i found myself speechless. so i did what dumb guys do, and smiled and tried not to trip over my own feet.

i’m glad to say that since then we’ve gotten past the initial awkwardness, and i’ve been lucky enough to get to know her quite well. she tells me about ordinary things in ways that makes them seem foreign and exciting and magical. she tells me about strange and incredible things in ways that make them seem comfortable and familiar and knowable. in one of the first conversations we had she told me about skinny dipping in bio-luminescent algae, and it took my brain 20 minutes to reset enough to form a coherent thought.

she does breast cancer research but prefers the word “tits”. she worked her ass off and suffered through the pettiness and discrimination of smaller minded people to earn a PhD. she cares deeply about her work, about the process of science and not only has great love for the grand discoveries of life but also for the small, microscopic daily trials and victories. she finds beauty on the cellular level. she shows me very small things i never knew existed, pictures that glow green and purple and bright. she explains technical things in a way that makes me want to know more and be smarter. she’s merciful to mice, patient with students, good to her friends, true to her family.

she puts words together in ways i’ve never thought of, gives magic to simple notions, lends simplicity and understanding to complexity, and makes me want to reread everything. vic kicks my ass so consistently at scrabble (in her non-native tongue, no less) that she’s sure i’m losing on purpose. sadly, i’m not.

she bakes fifty muffins at once, all different kinds. makes bread and truffles and exotic savory things. she’s undaunted. in baking, and in life, she measures carefully, kneads well, mixes thoroughly and licks the bowl clean when she’s done.

so i was at a wahoo’s in burbank a couple weeks ago getting some lunch and i happened to come across a copy of LA citybeat with my lili haydn cover on it. this was surprising because the issue came out in april, and the copy left on the stand here was in perfect condition. it’s always nice to just happen across these things because i rarely get to see how my pictures actually end up in print. i only have a handful of clients who take the time to send me tearsheets (thanks, guys) and mostly what i end up seeing are PDFs, instead.

so the surprise came when i opened up to the table of contents and saw the cover credit above. wow, that was really nice of them. actually, it was really nice of the art director, matt ansoorian. so yeah, thanks, matt. i’m glad you liked the picture.

i just received an email from my old college saying that the dorm i lived in as a freshman is about to be demolished and rebuilt elsewhere. it’s kind of funny to me that this notice would come on this particular day, july 2nd, because i have very clear memories of that dorm, mostly of the first few weeks of my freshman year. of course, all the freshmen get to school a week or two before everyone else and undergo orientation to ease into being there so that maybe by the time class starts they won’t be so scared out of their minds and confused. those first couple weeks you end up with a lot of 18 year olds walking around nervous as can be, trying to act cool, and that was certainly us.

that first year of college i shared a wall with amy macwilliamson. our dorm rooms were right next to each other, and we hit it off right away. strangely, our room-mates ended up being good friends, too. sometimes i’d knock on the wall and amy would knock back. for some reason this pleased me very much, and i remember feeling that that simple act was an indication to me that i was somewhere else – both in place and in life – and even being as resistant to change as i was, i felt it was a good thing. i won’t embarrass amy and say publicly what i used to call her as a nickname. i will embarrass myself and say that i sometimes still call her that, even all these years later. that first year, after being fast friends for a few weeks, we had a falling out and took a couple years to come back around.

of course, this was all before either of us knew anything about photography, before either of us had ever considered taking a photo class, let alone taking pictures for our lives. in fact, i think we became friends again in the school’s small, poorly equipped darkroom. i was knee deep in trying to figure out how a rolleiflex worked and if i was crazy to be doing any of this, and amy was just starting to make quietly powerful and thoroughly humanistic pictures. while i was busy filling horse feeding troughs with fixer and bolting enlargers to tables trying to make giant prints, getting distracted by the toys and science of it all, amy was there, inadvertently teaching me important lessons: slow down. don’t be so flashy. look at people evenly and quietly. if you want someone to be real in your pictures, be real to them in person.

i always use the word quiet when talking about amy’s pictures. i’ve used it so much in talking to her that it probably annoys her now. but i keep repeating this because a sense of quiet (without being boring or mundane or plain) is such a difficult thing to achieve in a picture, and when it works i find it to be more impactful than almost anything. amy’s so good at this, and i’m jealous every time i see her photos. sometimes i think amy’s photos are like mountain goats songs, or raymond carver stories. that is, they all seem to me to be about that moment in someone’s life when everything has changed, but nothing has happened yet. there’s always a sense in her pictures that something really momentous is just about to happen to these people, and it’s a really beautiful thing.

anyway, today, july 2nd, i learned that the wall we used to knock on is being knocked down, and today, july 2nd, is amy macwilliamson’s birthday. i’m even prouder today to call her my friend than i was many years ago. happy birthday, amy. thanks for being so awesome for so long.

the hat, a gift from me, was lost some time later. there will be other hats in the future, no doubt. this was at the museum of modern art, the one corner of the museum without any modern art in it, apparently.

i love shooting editorially, but it does have its downsides. aside from the obvious economic problems, you usually only have one day with any given subject. sometimes only fifteen minutes. it doesn’t allow for much time to really get to know the people in front of the camera, and that’s too bad. afterall an interest in and a care for people is actually what makes this job engaging and interesting. on editorial jobs i often wonder what becomes of people once the picture is done and the article is published and life goes on as normal. it’s too easy to lose track of things, which is strange, too, because i have to admit to feeling a certain attachment to each of the people i photograph. (wasn’t it hitchcock who said something along the lines of “you have to fall in love with your leading ladies”? then again, he also said to film your love scenes like murders and your murders like love scenes, so there were obviously other issues at play here. . .) it’s very rare that i get to revisit the same subject more than once.

[one exception, though: i did get to photograph stan lee twice. that was, of course, a big thrill for me, being the big nerd that i am. but it was also a little disappointing because stan lee didn't remember me. i did get to go to his house, and it was around christmastime, and the house was really decked out with decorations - kind of crazily so. it was intimated that this was stan's wife's doing, and it seemed that all his comic book stuff was shoved off in to one room, which i thought was kind of unfair. two funny things about the second stan lee shoot (i don't know why i'm getting off on this tangent. . .): 1) when his assistant called my answering machine to give me the particulars of where to go and when, he happened to be on a conference call with stan and didn't hang up when he thought he did, so i got an extra five or six minutes of eavesdropping on their conversation. 2) when the shoot was done i told stan i could get everything cleaned up and out of there in ten minutes so he sat in his chair and timed me with a stopwatch, occasionally announcing how much time was left.]

initially a desire to spend more time with my subjects led me to begin work on what eventually became a book project, my heart vs. the real world. this solved a great deal of the sometimes-creative-dissatisfaction that can come with working editorially. i was able to pick the subjects and subject matter myself. i was able to shoot exclusively in black and white. and most importantly i was able to revisit the same people repeatedly over a long period of time. and because i was dealing with kids and families an unexpected side effect of this was that i was able to watch my subjects grow up right in front of me. we all became very close, and it was nice to feel like a role model of sorts.

i once went to sea world with dylan and mario. i think they were around eleven or twelve years old at the time. we were walking along through the crowd, dylan was holding my hand and mario was holding on to the strap of my camera bag so as not to get lost. mario stopped and thought for a second and then said “hey, we all have pacemakers.” and we were all very pleased by this. it was a nice sense of belonging, or of being in the right place with the right people.

now mario and dylan are sixteen or seventeen years old. i got to spend an afternoon with them over the summer at mario’s house, when dylan came to visit from arizona. ali came to visit for the afternoon, too. they’ve grown up a bit. dylan got more rock and roll. he plays guitar and sings now. mario took all that childhood rambunctiousness and energy he had as a kid in karate class and transferred it to being a teenager. ali ditched the rollerblades in favor of a camera and punk rock music. she takes pictures now, and they’re good. she says she wants to be a photographer when she grows up, and i wonder about my influence – if any – on this decision. she writes me wonderful emails with lots of question marks all in a row, and wants to go on photo tours of hollywood.

[ex: "max we want to see you and i want you to help me with my camera. we should go to hollywood and take pictures of the town who worships their stars by putting their name in stars so we can walk over it and dogs can piss on it..sound good????"]

and all of this – regardless of the photos – reminds me of the point of what it is i spend so much time and energy trying to do. it’s really nice to feel like i’ve had an influence on people’s lives, and really nice to see the influence they’ve all had on mine.

on september 15, 2007 my brother got married in carmel, california (more on this later). i was the best man, for once. these are from the rehearsal dinner the night before (my parents, and my sister, danielle.)