recently, as my lovely girlfriend’s birthday was approaching, i found myself scrambling to figure out a knockout birthday gift for her. she is a woman of refined tastes but modest needs, and sentiment seems to go far. lucky for me, i’m pretty damn good with the sentiment. of course, seeing as how i set a precedent early on in the relationship with maybe a few too many grand or (grandly sweet) gestures, i kind of set myself up for a level of expectation on the birthday gift that i suddenly wasn’t sure i could live up to. the only outright request coming forth was to bake a very specific and foolishly decorated sort of cake (which will not be pictured here), but that certainly wouldn’t count as a gift. at least not by my estimation.

luckily, as the day was approaching i noticed an article in entertainment weekly with marc maron. marc is a comedian, former air america radio host, and now a prolific podcaster. also, my girlfriend loves him. a lot. she seems to have no tolerance whatsoever for talk radio in nearly any form, but is a loyal and rabid fan of marc maron’s WTF podcast. the article mentioned marc recorded his podcast in his home, which happened to be only 7 miles away from where i lived. aha. . .

i sent maron an email through his site, explaining my situation, explaining who i was, hopefully explaining that i’m not a hack, and asked if he’d let me photograph him as a birthday gift for a strange girl he’s never met. typical for me, the email was too long and too wordy, and a few days passed with no response. i was starting to get nervous, trying to figure out any sort of gift that’d be as good as the gift of marc maron. but then, marc maron saved my ass. i was actually at my girlfriend’s house when i checked my email. two lines:

“I’m in. I like pictures of me. When?

Thanks, Maron.”

we ended up being able to schedule the shoot about a week and a half before my girlfriend’s birthday, which gave me ample time to print them and throw ‘em in a frame. i set up a small studio in marc’s living room, and he was great. sometimes i’m a little nervous with comedians, they often tend to do shtick. from what i knew of marc before meeting him he seemed a more introspective, darkly neurotic, pessimistic sort, so i figured we’d get along all right. we may have similar sort of oh-shit-what-now worldviews, and whatnot. i explained what i wanted to do, something simple, on a white backdrop, in black & white, and he was all in. even though i expected to have not more than 10-15 minutes with him, marc was actually really patient and suggested many things that i never thought he’d go for. at one point he said “hey, i have a devil hat.” that’s not something you hear every day, so i couldn’t pass it up.

it was actually really nice to do a shoot like this in this sort of context. usually when i shoot celebrities it’s for a much different audience. maybe you shoot it for the specific photo editor and you try to gear it toward what they might like, maybe you gear it toward what the magazine might need, or what the thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of faceless, nameless readers might like. the things you want from the shoot for yourself often have to take a backseat to other priorities, as time and freedom to dictate circumstance is often very much in short supply. what a lucky thing to be able to do something like this for an incredibly specific audience, for just one person.

in the end, i made two prints for the birthday present, 10″x13″, framed. you might think it strange to give a shirtless picture of some other dude to your girlfriend as a birthday gift, but let me tell you. . . it went over great. at first she didn’t know exactly where the pictures came from, but she’d been on enough shoots with me to know that they were my pictures. the realization slowly dawned, he was at marc maron’s house. and then she realized that the whole thing was set up just for her. i did have the fleeting thought, though, as i was giving her the wrapped, framed prints, “wait, he was awfully quick to take off his shirt. . .is marc maron flirting with my girlfriend?”. still, she never saw it coming, and marc maron made me look like a hero. thanks, man.

though only a senior in college, stephen is already one of the flying karamazov brothers. more importantly he brings props to the shoot that light on fire. there are very few jobs i do that couldn’t be improved with something in the picture being on fire. or doused in liquid nitrogen, for that matter. i confess to seeking out liquid nitrogen every time i go to photograph someone at caltech.

i met stephen four years ago when he was a college freshman. at the time he was – as he is now – 6’4″ tall, and a juggler, and we were taking pictures in a room with an eight foot ceiling. no good. this time we reserved a room with the highest ceiling we could find, just to be safe – a theater on occidental’s campus. i saw this “KEEP CLEAR” sign backstage while we were loading in equipment, but we spent most of our time getting our standard juggling-bowling-pins action shots in front of the stage curtain. at the the very end of the shoot, just minutes before the stage managers were to come back and kick us out, stephen had the good sense to say “i have a torch“.

so did this shot really quickly, stephen squirting lighter fluid around with abandon, and trying not to get too close to the sprinklers. of course, he wanted to juggle the torch but i liked this better. maybe it’s the same reason i don’t like laughing pictures of comedians. too easy. he’s a really tall, kinda lanky and goofy, good-natured guy, and i like that he looks sort of badass in this shot.

well, as much of a badass as is possible, being a man in a skirt and bowtie.

the torch helps.

my thanks as always to cpl. bennett for his patient and knowledgeable assistance, and to dick anderson at oxy.