painter jacob kassay sent me a brief email shortly before our photo session. it said:

“Just a heads up I don’t show my face in photos. Hope that is okay.” 

well, that’s a new one. when i asked for some clarification – just how obscured do you need to be? – jacob replied:

 “See you Tuesday at 11. Looking forward.”

after warning the magazine that this might yield something they weren’t quite expecting, i started really looking forward to the shoot. jacob is a young painter, in his 20s, and does really lovely, strange work. his paintings are abstract, and almost mirrorlike and reflective in their qualities, as he uses silver and metallic paints. jacob told me he started out studying photography, enjoyed alternative processes and never really considered himself a painter in the beginning. he says his interest in photography naturally led him to using metallic tones in his paintings.

oh, and the whole obscuring thing? jacob (who reminds me of a young peter beard) just says that he doesn’t want to be recognized at art openings. he wants to be able to enjoy the work without being hassled by people. as he’s achieved more and more success he’s found this to be increasingly difficult, so he decided that the solution was to have nobody really know quite what he looks like.

in practical terms, to take a portrait of jacob, i actually found this restriction to be quite interesting. it definitely led me to make some choices that i wouldn’t otherwise have made, and approach things very differently. the fact that jacob himself was so accommodating and willing to be collaborative made the shoot really enjoyable. so often i find that subjects put up layers of restriction that mainly serve to stifle creativity (you can only use this room, you can only have five minutes, i’ll only smile in pictures, no profile shots, take my picture in front of the sign for my company, etc). i try to have patience with these things, as i realize 99% of the time they simply come out of a feeling of being insecure or uncomfortable in front of the camera, and a portrait photographer absolutely must be sensitive to that. it was nice, for a change, to get a strange request that had some method behind the madness, something that actually led to a special kind of result.

thanks, jacob.

wandering around los angeles with mr. iliketotellstories, himself, on his birthday. bowling plans were scrapped in favor of picture taking, and trying to find gaffer’s tape that didn’t cost $45 a roll. jonathan hits his signature move, and we didn’t get busted for taping up the wall of some industrial building. all that plus lunch equals a fairly successful birthday celebration, as far as these things can go.

when jordan was very young his friend and mentor committed suicide, depressed after a breakup. trying to come to terms with the event, trying to make sense of it and not simply remain powerless, jordan decided to do all he could to prevent other people from killing themselves. he trained to work on a teen suicide hotline, but when it came time to actually take to the phones he found he didn’t have the stomach for it. his friend’s death was just too close. but he wanted to help, nonetheless.

with much effort, a lot of legwork, and a tremendous amount of determination for a high school student, jordan organized a fundraiser called “summer lovin’” that was held at the roxy in hollywood. as a result of his efforts he managed to raise over forty thousand dollars for the teen helpline.

i photographed jordan this past summer, as he was getting ready to begin his freshman year at stanford. he had passed the baton of the next fundraiser to another student at his high school. like most would-be freshmen, he seemed excited for what was next, trusting in the inevitability of great things to come.

this was my third trip to the coroner’s office, and i have to say, you don’t ever quite get used to it. i think it’s easier to become accustomed to the look of things than it is to become accustomed to the smell. it’s the smell that stays with you. dead bodies stop looking like people at a certain point. i know that sounds strange, but it’s sort of true. so while death eventually doesn’t look real, the whiff of death sure smells real. at least san mateo seemed a whole hell of a lot quieter and less gruesome (on that particular day) than the los angeles county coroner’s office. people here, they seem to die in bad ways, and a lot of them.

kenneth showed us around, and couldn’t have been more agreeable. it was a light day, their crypt wasn’t even very full. while we were there only one body came in, and that was of an elderly woman who had passed away in the hospital attached to the morgue. apparently she didn’t have any immediate family to claim her, so she ended up with kenneth. it’s his job to assist the coroner with autopsies, and try to figure out what caused a person to die. for ken, part of the appeal of the job is the puzzle of it, and part of the appeal is in being able to provide answers to the decedent’s loved ones. sometimes just knowing how and knowing why can provide the closure that a family might need.

around the coroner’s office a couple of things stood out to me as being particularly gruesome. actual corpses notwithstanding, that is. the first was a hard plastic headrest lying on the autopsy table. it was there to hold the corpse’s head up. while that fact is benign enough, it was all the gouges and cuts taken out of the headrest that really got your stomach turning. those cuts are from the bone saws used to open up people’s skulls.

on the wall was a cabinet of yellowed forms. paperwork. i’m sure all of your offices have cabinets full of forms, too. but these were a little different. the drawing of the baby was especially unsettling. how many babies have to die before some government department draws up a form for it?

i met larry early one morning by the banks of big bear lake. he had gone out fishing with a friend and caught quite a few rainbow trout. a good haul, one that any fisherman might be proud of. when we arrived larry had just gotten back to shore and was happy to show off the fruits of his labor. for larry, now, even being able to fish at all is something to be proud of.

up until the fall of 2006 larry was a fire captain in apple valley, california. one morning his company responded to a call for a house fire. thinking there might be people still trapped inside the house, larry went in, crawling on his hands and knees, staying low to avoid the smoke. the house turned out to be empty, but before larry could get out the fire spread across the carpet he was crawling on. he suffered severe burns across thirty percent of his body, but his hands got it the worst. flames went through his gloves, destroying his hands.

he spent nearly two months in a burn center. there was talk of amputation. those first few months doctors performed more than a dozen surgeries trying to save his hands. he eventually lost the little finger on each hand. what was left became a mass of scar tissue, with badly damaged fingers fused together.

after being released from the burn center, back at home, the real life ramifications of what happened to him started to become clear. while larry’s hands hadn’t been amputated, they simply didn’t work anymore. he couldn’t hold on to anything. he became aware of how much losing the use of his hands made him feel separated from the world. he couldn’t drive himself to work, didn’t have the stomach for a desk job. he couldn’t dress himself, or hold a fork, or even hug his wife. all his life he had been an avid outdoorsman and carpenter. without his hands, all that was gone.

several months later larry met dr. david kulber at cedars-sinai medical center in los angeles, a plastic surgeon who specializes in hand reconstruction. dr. kulber performed half a dozen surgeries on larry’s hands over the next two years, slowly carving away scar tissue, trying to separate fingers that had been burned together, recovering and reconnecting tendons and arteries. more than anything, though, what he was doing was giving larry’s life back to him. his hands aren’t what they were, but they’re better than he thought they ever would be again. he can eat and dress himself. he can hold his wife. he can hold a fishing pole. and he can even show off  a fine looking rainbow trout to a stranger with a camera.

i’m exceptionally pleased to say that my new site has officially launched. this is the first major redesign since 2008 and there’s a lot to see. there’s an all new interface, first of all, and even better still, a 100% HTML, ipad/iphone-friendly site. this thing will look just the same on your phone as it will on the desktop browser. big pictures. never before seen images – lots and lots of them. structural reorganization. facebook, twitter and email integration – you can now tweet and post to facebook directly from your favorite image pages. (i’m a bit late to the social media party, i know, but what’s important is that we all get there eventually, right?) a new and improved latestshot blog theme that highlights imagery above all else. there’s even a new bio pic of yours truly. you’re welcome, internet.

click the “portfolio” link up there at the top.

if you haven’t visited for a while, welcome back. let me know what you think.

shortly before halloween i got the chance to photograph kevin williamson. kevin is a writer and producer most famous for creating dawson’s creek and writing the scream movies. now, kevin’s got two shows on TV, the vampire diaries and the secret circle. kevin is a guy who seems to love something scary as long as it’s also a little campy, and loves putting fictional teenagers into angsty and horrifying situations. could he have predicted that joey potter would have a scientologist baby? scary…

this was a rare sort of assignment in that i’ve actually photographed kevin once before, way, way back in 1999, in the dawson’s creek days. working editorially it’s extremely rare that i get to revisit a subject and see what happens to them later. the original photo i took of kevin was one that he ended up licensing from me and using as his PR shot for a long while.

when i went to meet him this time, he introduced himself, and i introduced myself, and then i told him that i’d actually photographed him before. he looked a me for a moment, squinted a bit and then said:

“did you take that photo where i look evil? that’s my favorite picture of myself, ever!”

here’s the original “evil” picture from 1999:

to conclude the der spiegel space story i visited with george whitesides at the headquarters of virgin galactic. george was born into the field. his father is a harvard chemist, and prior to become CEO and president of virgin galactic he was the chief of staff at NASA. they build their spaceships out in the mojave desert, but maintain an office right in the middle of old town pasadena, next to a fancy soap store and a patagonia shop. you’d never know it unless you paid special attention to the little spaceship drawn on the doorway outside.

when richard branson got done flying balloons around the world he aimed a bit higher – taking private citizens into space, at a price tag of only $200,000 each. get in line, everybody!