this shoot took place over two days in mid august, put together at a scramble with just hours to spare; the second day shoot addressing some wardrobe issues that were not able to be dealt with in the mad dash the day before.

celebrity shoots go fast and can be minefields of scheduling, intention and negotiation. very often things are decided at the last minute, and very often things that should have  been communicated clearly before the shoot begins are missed in the rush. this is no one’s fault in particular, just one of those things that happens when you deal with busy people. trust and rapport can be difficult to establish in these situations, especially when the subject isn’t particularly fond of being photographed, or has felt that things didn’t go so well when they were photographed in the past. i have great empathy for those made uneasy by the inherent discomfort of the photo shoot, and generally speaking i pride myself on being good at getting my subjects to look past that. it is surprising, though, when i am approached as an adversary rather than a creative partner.

often the most interesting things about any given picture are things best not discussed later. the publicity industrial complex is always surprising even though i’ve been in its vice-grip countless times.

jason reitman is a director (most famously of juno, and thank you for smoking before that). i am a fan of his films, despite any headaches this shoot might have caused at the time. this shoot was done for the cover of driven magazine, set to hit the stands in conjunction with the toronto film festival which featured jason’s new movie, up in the air. the orange chairs in the pic above are from the detroit airport where they filmed part of the movie. apparently this terminal was being renovated and the chairs trashed, but instead they ended up in jason’s office in beverly hills.

my thanks to dave and neil, and to kelly and gary at driven for their long hours, hard work and grace under fire.

ruben is the CEO of propaganda global entertainment marketing. that means he’s responsible for you seeing in movies the things you desperately want but can’t afford (like a lamborghini, or robot cell phones). that means that ruben’s LA office is full of cool things that you desperately want but can’t have. like motorcycles, fake newspapers from gotham city, and an american flag made of 25,000 swarovski crystals. (okay, maybe i don’t want a motorcycle or a crystal flag, but it would have been great (in a geeky sort of way) to get a copy of the gotham city newspaper.)

ruben is the coolest guy in the room. especially if that room only contains cpl. bennett, ruben and myself. he has handmade italian sneakers. he has a custom painted macbook (blue, perhaps to match the sneakers). he rides around town on a motorcycle that transforms into a robot (well, with michael bay’s help, at least). he lives in switzerland. that makes him more neutral than you, at least, and possibly cooler than you.

i left ruben’s thinking seriously about purchasing custom made clothing, pondering why i wasn’t nearly as suave as i should be, and wondering if i could take better care of handmade italian sneakers than i could my $25 skechers. likely not. custom made shirts, though, there’s something to think about. especially when you’re me and nothing in a store actually fits you. also, pocket squares seem like an important thing that i’m missing. that’s just plain classy. i’ll have to look into that.

see the full article here, and my thanks to scott at businessweek for the gig.

twenty years ago anissa ayala was a 16 year old girl who had just found that she had developed a very aggressive form of leukemia. at the time the national donor registry had very few names and with no matches on the donor list, and no matches in the family, the ayalas made an unusual decision. mary and abe decided to have another child, hoping that that child would somehow be a match for anissa. it was a longshot, to be sure, the odds of a match were less than 25%.

in 1990 marissa ayala was born and was a perfect donor. the bone marrow transplant was a success and anissa remains cancer free to this day. now 19, marissa lives with her parents while going to school and anissa, now 37, works for the leukemia and lymphoma society.

when marissa was born the ayala’s decision to have a new child to save their daughter was met with outrage as much as anything else. there were threats made, and accusations of farming babies for spare parts. still, the family’s love for marissa is clear, and clearly not just related to saving anissa’s life.

many people spend a great deal of time struggling with indecision, wishing that their lives somehow had a predetermined direction or some built-in meaning. we try to find this through our work, through our friends, through love and desire, through religion. imagine if you were marissa ayala, and you actually were born for a very specific reason. would that make life easier or harder? what if you knew that the thing you were born to do had already been done, that it had, in fact, been done before you could even remember. would that change things? would you struggle with indirection and indecision like the rest of us who only hope that we have a purpose? we go through our lives manufacturing our own reasons for living, for getting up in the morning, for getting out of bed, for going to work and getting things done. then every once in a while there are people for whom the reasons truly are built-in to who and why they are.

my thanks to florence nash at people magazine for the assignment, and of course, to cpl. bennett for his gracious assistance.

here’s the photo they used, as it appeared in the magazine.

sometimes i get pegged for the tough jobs. i have a handful of clients for whom i fall into a certain niche; i’m the go-to guy for stories that require sensitivity in handling, stories that involve advocacy for patients or those in some distress. i’ve even been referred to as “humanistic” by some editors. frankly, i’m very pleased to be thought of this way. i’ve always found myself drawn to portraiture as a humanistic endeavor – i mean, how could it not be? i’m also very drawn to the idea of approaching and treating subjects very simply, without much in the way; a minimum of the unnecessarily stylized or produced touches you often see in other photo shoots.

i was asked by TIME magazine to illustrate a story written by karl taro greenfeld. karl was writing about his younger brother, noah. noah is 42 years old and a low-functioning autistic. the article was to be an adaptation/excerpt from karl’s book, “boy alone: a brother’s memoir“ about growing up with noah and the idea of eventually becoming his brother’s sole steward.

noah lives in a small, somewhat run-down house in los angeles. he’s kept company constantly by at least one nurse. noah is unable to take care of himself in any meaningful way; he can’t clean himself, cook himself a meal or even dress himself. noah doesn’t really talk, either, though he’s constantly vocalizing, making a series of sharp, often loud grunts and other sounds. noah bangs his hands and feet against the floor almost continually, making noises, and sometimes even hits his head against things seemingly on purpose.

when i accepted the job it came with a wide range of immediate restrictions: no auxiliary lighting whatsoever. no assistant. no tripod. noah might refuse to be photographed at all. noah could try to grab or bite me. i was told noah reacts best to very tall, very large men. perhaps he feels intimidated and that works to calm him. however, i’m 5’7″ and quite thin. oh well.

i was nervous going in, but also kind of excited. you don’t often get a glimpse of what life is like for someone like noah. we all hear quite a lot about autism in children, but then people tend to forget that there is no getting better from a very severe case like noah’s, and they tend to lose interest when the sufferers grow up, stop being cute and start to feel like more of a burden. i was also very excited to work from the set of restrictions, photographically speaking. part of the challenge would be in making noah comfortable with me, part would be in getting something that looks good without any control over the situation or any ability to direct the subject.

i met karl at the house on a sunday morning. we weren’t there very long, but karl seemed to think that noah took quite well to me. i shot very quickly, trying to be quiet and non-threatening. i laid down on the floor with noah. i don’t know if karl would admit it, but noah seemed happy to see him, and didn’t even seem to mind me all that much. karl claims we got him on a good day.

read the article here. the issue is out today, may 18th.

my thanks to karl, and to martha, crary and dietmar at TIME mag.

in the summer of 1998, in a small town in ohio, a 5 year old girl was killed, stabbed in the throat. anthony harris was twelve years old at the time, one of very few african american kids in town. after a couple weeks of searching for the girl’s killer, police arrested anthony and interrogated him. they used a technique meant for adults, meant to elicit confessions in cases where there was already significant evidence. it’s also commonly known that this technique can elicit false confessions in children. so anthony confessed. he was scared, confused and tired. but he wasn’t the killer.

the forced confession was all the evidence the prosecutor had against him, but it was enough. he was sentenced to prison where he spent two years waiting for his lawyers to overturn the conviction. the original prosecutor and judge remained convinced of anthony’s guilt despite acknowledging that the confession was coerced. but he was a free man, he rejoined his family, he went to high school. when he tried joining the marines his past was dug up and he was denied. a year later he tried joining the army and was again denied. in the meantime there was a civil suit ongoing. eventually this was settled for over three and a half million dollars. anthony’s name was cleared, finally. he joined the marines in 2006, has served one tour in iraq, and when i went to meet him he was expecting to head to afghanistan sometime in the near future.

i met up with anthony in his hotel room in san diego. he was on leave for the weekend, seeing a girlfriend, looking to buy a house with some of his settlement money. he didn’t talk much about the case, which i can understand. sometimes when you spend your whole life trying to put something behind you the last thing you want to do is keep explaining it to people. we set up the shots while anthony went to drive his girlfriend home, though somehow that short trip ended up taking him over two hours. ordinarily this kind of behavior annoys me, but really, there are some people who deserve to be cut a little slack. he’s got to be one of them, right?

my thanks to corporal bennett for his gracious assistance, and to the incomparable maggie soladay at the american lawyer magazine for picking a really unconventional shot for the opener. that’s really cool, maggie, and i very much appreciate it.

see the whole story here.

for the past few days i’ve been chasing a 6 week old kitten around the floor of my office, trying not to get my feet clawed and bitten. i’ve had to move fast and be vigilant. still, sometimes the little guy catches me, even though i’m watching him out of the corner of my eye at all times, even though my reflexes are pretty good for my advanced age. for all the many things wrong with me (and there are many) i’m still able to move about the world fairly well. i take this for granted every single day. so, i suspect, do most of you. if i couldn’t get out of the way in time my socks and pant legs would be shredded by now. but what if i couldn’t even hold myself up in bed? i’d be kitten fodder for sure.

lilly grossman has mitchondrial disease. if you remember from high school biology, the mitochondria are the parts of the cells that create energy. the energy to sit up in bed, the energy to regulate your body temperature, the energy to walk down the hall, the energy to dance or talk or write or chase a kitten around a room. this disease is very rare and takes many different forms. in lilly it seems to affect her muscles, primarily. she has trouble holding herself up. she uses a walker, and sometimes still falls over, lacking the strength even to lean on it. because it takes so many complex muscle movements to do so, lilly even has trouble talking clearly at times.

lilly is also eleven years old. she loves high school musical, the color pink and hannah montana. she laughs at the things her parents do, and generally seems to be having a great time, no matter where she is.

as someone who has spent a lot of time around sick children – and, more importantly, as someone who has spent a lot of time as a sick child – i can confidently say that i could not begin to imagine the incredible patience it must take to be lilly grossman. lilly is whip smart. she’s watching and listening to everything. she’s laughing at everything. she just can’t move very well. she has a lot to say. she just has trouble putting the words together and getting them out right. when that’s your whole life you get used to it. you can get used to anything. but just being used to something doesn’t make it less frustrating, especially not when you’re seeing everyone else float so effortlessly through the things that cause you to struggle every moment of every day. now to be fair, this is me talking – i’m not pretending to speak for lilly here. it’s quite possible that lilly doesn’t have a care in the world and she’s perfectly happy, even being a bit incapacitated. in fact, i’m sure of it. but the whole of a life and the breadth of any single person’s experience is never so simple, never so easily summed up in one pat and tidy way.

when i was a kid i was always shocked and a little annoyed when people referred to me as frail or fragile. sure, my heart didn’t work very well, but i was used to it. i didn’t think of myself as fragile, and it pissed me off that other people did. even though they might have been right, and even though there wasn’t anything i could do about it, and even though what they thought didn’t really matter. but i had my happy days and my not so happy days. my cynical attitude, of course, has a lot more to do with the family i grew up in than with any illness i was born into. my point, inarticulate though it might be, is that when i meet these kids i try very hard never to assume that their lives are all bad or all sunshine and roses. the fact of the matter is that their lives are like anyone else’s, full of good days and bad days. it’s just that you have to try a little harder for the good days, that’s all.

lilly’s parents, steve and gay, try hard for the good days. they’ve built their lives around making sure the good days outnumber the bad. they moved to san diego from cleveland, to a climate that was much more stable and much more gentle on lilly’s system. gay was telling me about how so many of her old friends have become the kind of women who say they don’t need a man for anything. convincing themselves, perhaps, if no one else. but gay insists that she’d be lost without steve to back her up. i’ve seen too many families tear themselves apart over the stress of a child’s illness, but sometimes you see one come together heroically, put unnecessary things aside and make their lives work for them. watching steve and gay care for lilly even in the short time i visited with them, it was very clear that in doing so they’re caring for each other just as much.

i’ve been meaning to post these pics for a while now, but i’ve been struggling to figure out how to explain the story concisely. in the end, i think i gave up trying to explain it. there was (is?) an ongoing pension scandal in the city of san diego with city workers, but the story is very convoluted and a little hard to follow and likely not particularly interesting unless you really, really enjoy being a securities lawyer.

for my money, even though i didn’t really understand the legalese involved, i found the key players to be very interesting to talk to. the main subject in the story is san diego city attorney mike agguire (above). the son of a boxer, he’s called a “bulldog” by his enemies. aguirre seemed to be the driving force behind the pension investigation that – and i know i’m going to screw this up – i think involved many people getting overinflated pension benefits illegally, while at the same time robbing the system of sufficient funds to finance those pensions. regardless of my inability to be a lawyer, mike aguirre was one of the smartest guys i’ve gotten to talk to in a long, long time. he’s one of those guys who immediately seems fiercely intelligent the second he opens his mouth. i left there with a very good impression of the guy, and i always admire someone who’s so open as a photo subject. in his defense, we shot these pics on a sunday. he was still at work, but with shorts and sandals. hey, it’s san diego.

other key players, also working with aguirre were don “the rat” mcgrath and bryan vess. don is the assistant city attorney, and all of us at the magazine spent some time trying to figure out why he was called “the rat”. there was speculation amongst the photo department that he might look rodent-like, perhaps, though this proved not to be the case. the real reason: it was a nickname he had in college (no explanation why, and also no explanation as to why he would choose to keep it many, many years later). bryan vess is an outside attorney hired to help with the investigation. this has been ongoing for a long while, you can see all the document boxes surrounding bryan. in case you all think being a lawyer is glamorous, imagine having to go through all that paperwork just to find something that might help your case. no thanks! wait a second, though, lawyers get to bill in 15-minute increments, right? maybe that’s not so bad.

i just heard from bryan vess that mike aguirre just lost the election and is no longer the city attorney in san diego. i wouldn’t count the guy out, though. he’s got some fight in him. all i know is if someone’s suing me, i want that guy on my side.

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.)

late last night paul sent me a link to a story about the marines involved in the haditha massacre. it seems they have all been cleared, except for one.

as a bit of background, this is from the NPR website:

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the leader of a Marine squad that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha, faces a military hearing Thursday at Camp Pendleton. He is charged with 18 counts of unpremeditated murder in the largest criminal case to emerge from the war in Iraq.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, as Sgt. Wuterich’s squad approached Haditha, a roadside bomb killed a fellow marine. Wuterich said the dismembered body is a sight he will never forget.

About 100 yards away, Wuterich, who had never been in combat before, saw a taxi with five young men in it. In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Wuterich said the men were ordered out of the car and “as they were coming around, they started to take off. So I shot at them.”

this is staff sergeant frank wuterich, with his daughter, talia, at their home in camp pendleton, california. it was shot on september 5th, 2006, and was one of the strangest and most interesting assignments i’d ever been involved in. the story was for TIME magazine, and they seemed to have an exclusive on it. the assignment was strange because of the exclusive – i found out about the shoot maybe a week before it happened, and was instructed to tell no one any details about it whatsoever. it was a big story, and breaking news, and the more excited i got about it the harder it was to refrain from talking about it. i started to feel like i was in a spy movie. i couldn’t tell my friends or family or my girlfriend anything about where i was going or what i was doing, not until it was published. when i was processing the pictures after the shoot i had to hide them from people so no one could know the subject matter until the magazine came out. we were sneaking into the base, so i couldn’t even bring an assistant on the shoot.

i drove down to san diego, picked up the writer at a hotel and went over to camp pendleton. we had a cover, in case the security guard at the gate stopped us. we were officially going to see someone else. the military wasn’t too keen on wuterich talking to the press. but i drove up to the gate and even though i had a big car full of gear they just waved us on through. i guess we got lucky. he was living in a house on base, with his wife, marisol, and two daughters. marisol was pregnant at the time. frank was supposed to be out of the military at that point, but they were keeping him in just until they figured out what to do with him. i guess two years later it’s still ongoing.

i was really surprised to find a relatively normal looking house, and even more surprised to see that it was just frank and his family there to talk to us. no lawyer, no official military liaison. still, he was expressly forbidden by his lawyer to discuss specifics of that day in haditha, so instead we got to talk to him as a human being, not as a soldier. it’s difficult to reconcile any of the details of what happened in iraq with this guy i saw sitting on the couch in front of me. he looked like any normal, clean cut guy in his mid twenties. he played guitar. he liked rock and jazz, he was an honor student in high school. he loved his wife and his kids. he joined the military in part, he said, because he wanted to be in the band.

now it seems that wuterich has filed a lawsuit against congressman murtha for libel and defamation. murtha was instrumental in bringing the haditha massacre to the public consciousness. the charges against wuterich now stand at 12 counts of voluntary manslaughter. this is all brings to my mind the idea of the craziness of war – how it’s all about semantics. it’s okay to kill people, just so long as you do it according to the rules we make up. and if you don’t follow the rules just make sure nobody finds out. then again, i don’t know how these soldiers do it. regardless of your politics, whether you think we should be in this war or not, when you look at the situation it’s hard not to view it as an even tie for last place. is anybody actually winning here? in a situation that’s designed where you have to kill people to progress, is there a way not to come in last? you’re sending kids off into hell, they’re scared out of their minds and miserable, they generally don’t speak the language and everything probably looks like a threat. if ever there was a lose-lose situation, this has got to be it.

when TIME was laying out the original article they were initially going to go with my first select – the B&W shot below. it was to run a full page, no text, and i was really thrilled. it was great space, a great layout and i was really pleased with the picture. it had a quiet that i quite liked. then the editors (not the photo dept.) started second-guessing the picture. the writer said “a marine would never lower his head” and they started worrying that maybe the picture made wuterich seem guilty. maybe it made too strong a statement. i kind of thought that was the point (not an assumption of guilt, but of making a statement of some kind), and tried to argue it, but eventually the photo was swapped out for an alternate of him looking straight ahead. it was okay, but nowhere near as good in my opinion. still, the story got good space in the magazine, which is always satisfying, and it was a unique experience to be involved in. my sincere thanks, as always, go to martha bardach at TIME, a continual champion for photographers.

some relevant links:

the original news story corporal bennett sent me that prompted this post.

the original TIME profile of wuterich in which my pictures appeared.

the wikipedia entry on frank wuterich.

frank wuterich’s home page.

wuterich on 60 minutes – this is long, but it’s really worth it.

an NPR news story on wuterich.

the haditha story broke when an eyewitness to the attacks reported what had happened. this is a youtube video interview with one of the eyewitnesses.

(the opinions expressed in all these links are, of course, not necessarily reflective of our beliefs here at msgphoto.com. if you have a problem with them, blame them, not me.)

every one of you probably has a friend who for years has been telling you stories about some friend of theirs, but you somehow never seem to meet this mysterious friend. well, tommy jordan has been telling me about his friend dave ralicke since i can remember. they were room-mates years ago at UCLA. and though i’ve been hearing about him for almost fifteen years now, i’ve never met dave ralicke. dave is a horn player who used to play with ozomotli, and now he plays with dengue fever (described as “60′s-vintage cambodian psychedelic rock”). so when i got an assignment to photograph dengue fever i thought to myself, hey, i’ll finally see what the deal is with this dave ralicke character.

no dice, though. before the shoot i was informed that the whole band would be there, with the exception of dave ralicke. dave was out of town.

i’m beginning to think this guy is a fabrication of tommy’s imagination. an elaborate, yet insignificant hoax.

so here’s dengue fever, minus ralicke.

zac holtzman really has quite the impressive beard.