max s. gerber(the latest shot)

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.

four years ago, as a junior at middlebury college, corey was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (lou gehrig’s disease). he had started to notice things. he had trouble moving well. his speech was sometimes slurred. it was harder to write and type than it should be. corey is tall and athletic, and even now, four years into a crippling disease, it’s easy to see that he has always been someone very much in control of his own physical being. you’d think that’d make things harder, but corey doesn’t complain. he’s not maudlin, or overly sentimental, but he’s not in denial, either. corey knows there is no cure for ALS. the average lifespan for someone diagnosed with ALS is two to five years. corey is on year number four. the disease is progressing slowly in him, which is good. still, he’s knows he’s been given a death sentence.

sometimes you hear people with terminal illnesses say that they’re just “living every moment for the best” and it sounds like they’re trying to convince themselves of something. corey says things along those lines, but i don’t doubt him for a second. when you’re sick and there’s nothing you can do about it, well. . . that’s one thing. when you’re sick and there’s nothing anybody around you can do about it, either, that’s another thing entirely. it can put a lot of pressure on you. i spent the day with corey, his mother and sister in piedmont this past august, and it was a really remarkable thing to see. they are not people scrambling to put a positive face on a terrible situation. they are positive people in the middle of a terrible situation, determined to enjoy their lives, appreciate each other and make sure the days count for something. they know there will come a time when corey can’t walk for himself, when he can’t talk, when he won’t even be able to breathe on his own. until then, life is good.

corey occasionally uses a motorized wheelchair but he can still walk with a cane. it’s a bit shaky and sometimes he says he falls. he says he’s good at falling. the family had to install an automatic chair to get him up and down the stairs. he works part time at his old high school, as an assistant tennis coach. he smiles a lot. as a cynical person, usually i’m annoyed with people who smile a lot, but corey’s got a way of selling it. oh, and his cane? it’s made out of a petrified bull’s penis, a gift from friends who know that he’s not about to lose his sense of humor.

on the way back to the airport at the end of the day, corey tells me about his involvement in various ALS benefits. he tells me how he gets to meet famous people now. or, silicon-valley famous people, at least. he starts to tear up a bit. he says that’s one side effect of the ALS. it can make it difficult to regulate your emotions. sometimes he finds things riotously funny for no reason and can’t stop laughing. other times he says he cries easily with little provocation, but the way he says it makes it pretty clear that he’s not crying for himself.

my thanks to the immeasurably wonderful pam fogg for the assignment.

happy birthday to e. john thawley III, a titan among men, and maker of the meanest brisket in the great state of california.

i was honored to have been chosen to photograph the new anti-methamphetamine print campaign for the ONDCP/partnership for a drug free america. in the scope of advertising, in the scope of products to sell and messages to convey with such a dominant medium i really couldn’t ask for more than this. the billboards are out this month, mostly in the midwest (illinois and missouri). i’m still trying to track someone down in those states to go hunt down and take a pic of a billboard for me. there are also print ads and posters up in gas stations, convenience stores and bus stops.

we did the shoot back in april over four days, two in columbia, missouri and st. louis, and two days in show low and snowflake, arizona. (snowflake, arizona sounds like a fictional town, or an oxymoron, but really, it was so cold we didn’t realize how sunburnt we all got until later.) the print ads were done to play in conjunction with short videos made with the same subjects, real life recovered meth addicts dawn (with her daughter, janessa) in columbia and steven in snowflake. the videos were produced by the nice folks at rockhard films, who also did an amazing job producing the photo shoots. my limitless thanks to nicole and shawn at rockhard. and my thanks to the incomparable mr. caparro for bringing me in to work on this campaign. videos by rockhard films below, and behind the scenes pics from our shoot with steven. (don’t laugh, my batting-cage-bedsheet scrim works great. the batting cage doesn’t travel well, though.)

visit lifeaftermeth.org for more.

a few months back i had a shoot that took place at wally’s barbershop in alta dena, california. ricky, above, is wally’s son, and helps to manage the shop. he wasn’t supposed to be our subject. we were actually there to photograph a doctor. it was a story about community health outreach being done in barbershops in an effort to educate people about high blood pressure and hypertension. it was a good story, a worthwhile story, about something that was intended to help people who normally wouldn’t seek help themselves.

the picture we were there to make was very different from this one, but i kept liking this great corner of the shop. and ricky, there to help us out on a day when the barbershop was normally closed, just fit so well there. once the job was done and the doctor was happy and off to lunch, ricky let us stay a bit longer and take his portrait. he even moved his deer head trophy to the corner for us. ricky killed the deer himself, in the mountains above alta dena, with a crossbow. as much as i hate the idea of hunting for myself, the thought of ricky dressed in camouflage hiking through the mountains with a crossbow. . . that’s pretty badass. that’s our next picture, for sure.

sometimes you find great people just hanging around the edges of photo shoots. i try to take advantage of this, and their kindnesses, whenever i can. i’ve done lots of pictures of security guards and janitors and executive assistants and passerby who had nothing to do with the assignment but just looked great and were curious enough to participate. often that turns around a day. it reminds me, sometimes, how great it feels to make a picture of someone with no ulterior motive, no intended purpose, no point other than to share something with a person who normally never gets to have that kind of experience. i am very grateful to them all.

thanks, ricky.

all the volatility in the markets this week got me thinking of a recent shoot with pete adamson, personal investment manager for oprah winfrey. watching and worrying about the dips, dives and leaps of my very small amount of apple stock, i wondered if the same movements cause exponential angst when you’re managing billions, instead.

my shoot with pete was one of those situations where i didn’t necessarily expect much, but the simplicity of the location and the agreeable nature of the subject came together better than i anticipated. i tend to take a lot of pictures of business-looking people in white shirts and ties standing in conference rooms, and generally speaking these tend to be a little routine. pete had just moved into his new office space, which was mostly devoid of furniture, but had these wonderful green and blue walls left over from the last tenant. that day it was just pete himself in the office, and a couple of computers. it was such a quiet, subdued operation it was hard to imagine he was sitting there controlling the fate of more money than most of us can comfortably fathom.

in addition to the more straightforward things, pete seemed quite willing to be just a little off-kilter for us, too. this is always such a gift to a photographer, and i end up leaving these sorts of shoots feeling tremendously grateful to the subject. the truth is that successful, busy people don’t often feel the need to do much more than show up, stand around looking bored and/or pissed off for a few short minutes and then declare the photo shoot done. when someone actually brings a little extra, when they invest themselves into the process, when they’re willing to play a bit against type it really elevates everything. the thing that’s simultaneously so wonderful about photographing people and so frustrating at the same time is that it’s not ever entirely me that determines the outcome. the person in front of the camera can do so much, or withhold so much. nothing drives me crazier, nothing is more upsetting than someone who just stands there smiling because they’re in a photo. i’d rather have someone be short tempered and brief than someone who puts on a fake grin designed to show nothing honest whatsoever. so when pete just rolled along with us in whatever we asked him to do, it was a real treat. i got the impression he kind of liked the process, too. or, at least, didn’t mind it so much – which is all you can ask, sometimes.

so, watching the stock market go up and down all week, i thought pete could use a laugh. last night i sent him a bunch of out-takes to see. i told him that i hoped all the volatility wasn’t causing him too much stress. a couple hours later, close to midnight, i got a brief response:

“Thank you max. Very thoughtful of you. My kids will get a kick out of these.”

pete adamson, always gracious.

he didn’t comment on the market, but somehow i think oprah will be all right.

back in march and october i had the chance to spend a few days visiting matt nathanson in silver lake, california, where he was recording his new album, modern love. matt was the very first person i met at college. he was a year ahead of me and had volunteered to mentor incoming freshmen during orientation week. so when i pulled my 1990 toyota celica into the parking lot of sanborn hall and struggled to get my bass amp out of the trunk, matt was there, ready to help out. i liked him instantly. at that time, with my wire frame john lennon glasses, mike-watt-inspired flannel shirts two sizes too big, a crazy long jewfro halfway down my back, and dreams of being a music major, i met matt and thought, yeah, this is going to work out.

matt ran an open mic every tuesday night at the grove house, a student coffee shop/meeting place on campus. that’s where i met john darnielle, too. i attended those open mic nights religiously, even played every once in a while when someone needed accompaniment. honestly, my freshman year of college is a blur of grove house open mic nights, way too many hours spent playing ping pong, and the revelation of my very first intro photo class in the spring semester. matt (and scarth) would close out each night with starfish and coffee, and to this day there’s no truer version of the song to me than that one.

matt would always play at some point during those tuesday nights. usually it was a song about a girl he knew in high school (remember, we were 19), and the story of unrequited romantic disaster was always as entertaining as the song, if not moreso. especially when he gave out the girl’s full name and actual phone number to the audience. all i can say is that those girls are lucky this all happened at a time when it was uncommon for people to have cell phones, and nobody had a texting plan.

even though i was a music major, my interest in music at that point was overwhelmed by my inner nerd. i was a bass player and only cared about other bass and guitar players. jaco pastorius, les claypool, steve vai.  i was overly impressed with technical proficiency, often mistaking chops for feel. it didn’t take long for matt to try to talk me out of this fallacy, and in the process, over the next several years, after forcing me to accept loans of a number of CDs, i came to appreciate songwriting more. matt’s enthusiasm not just for musicians but for how songs were put together was evident even then, especially when he would spend 35 minutes in a friend’s dorm room playing and replaying the same 45 seconds of a smashing pumpkins song until we all agreed that jimmy chamberlain was amazing. when i think back on what i gleaned from being a music major, i kind of feel like i should have given my tuition checks to my friends instead of to the school.

beyond the music nerd debates, there’s something else that was really important. i soon figured out that matt didn’t offer rambling intros to his songs, complete with full names and phone numbers just to be funny. he did it because that shit hurts. still. you don’t write songs and join a band because you think life is fair. (not unless you’re polyphonic spree) we’re all looking for a catharsis of some kind, or validation, or familiarity, or sympathy, or a way to vent. in those early songs i saw a version of matt that was tough to see then, and very difficult to see now, but one that was probably so clear to him. as awkward as he thought he was in high school, as difficult and inexplicable as he might have found women and relationships – hell, other people – to be, matt knew very early on that acting the part got you at least halfway. he told me once, when i was very young, that if you decide to behave confidently nobody will know that you’re scared shitless. of course, as i enter my late 30s, this advice almost seems obvious, but that was the first time i had heard it. i always appreciated it, and i never forgot the source.

so almost twenty years later i still count matt as one of my dearest friends. in the intervening time we’ve always been close, even if the crazy schedules of self-employed life make it take months in between visits or phone calls. even though we lead very different lives now the foundation of those early years, the awkwardness, the nerdiness, the angst-filled tendencies, they keep us on the same page. matt calls me on my shit when i need it called out, and vice versa.

but i’ve had the chance to see him grow into the bona fide rockstar we always kind of figured he was. i am pleased as could be to see that in the process he hasn’t lost his love of obscure drum fills, the great lyric that nobody notices, and a deep rooted dedication to his own neuroses. hey, man, it’s all part of the process. i am glad to see he’s no longer roaming the halls wearing skirts and arbitrarily flashing people. we all have to grow up some time, even if it’s just a little, right? we both even cut our hair. on that note, when i first picked up a camera back in 1993 matt was gracious enough to be my guinea pig. i rooted through some old print boxes today looking for that very first picture i took of him to put in this post, but i couldn’t find it. it’s probably better that way, as it would’ve been profoundly embarrassing for both of us.

matt’s new album was released last week. the pictures here are out-takes from other photos used in the liner notes booklet with the CD. do yourself a favor and pick it up. you can download it from itunes here.

thanks, matt.

last sunday morning i got a phone call from sebastian. i hadn’t seen him in almost eight years, i think, but we were facebook friends. he said apologetically, “my wife said i was crazy to call someone at 9:30 in the morning on a sunday, but i thought it’d be all right.” it was fine. it was, in fact, great to hear from him.

i first met sebastian in 1999, through camp del corazon, where he was a counselor and supporter. sebastian has a pacemaker and a defibrillator, and because of that the kids at the camp called him “zap man”. the last time i talked to him he had been a personal trainer, which – what with all the hardware he was sporting – was amazing. sebastian once told me a story about working out at the gym too soon after surgery and busting a wire right through his skin. i’d like to say that’s the only thing that kept me away from the gym, but really, it’s just my own laziness.

in the time since we last spoke he had changed careers, started working for the american heart association as a youth outreach coordinator, gotten married, had kids, moved to texas and then back to los angeles (not necessarily all in that order). he said that he had been in congestive heart failure and that he was going to need to get a mechanical heart valve put in. he asked if i would be interested in documenting his recovery.

i wasn’t able to be there for the day of the actual surgery as assignments had been keeping me busy last week, but i found time to visit with him yesterday, four days after the operation. he was walking around, moving better than i had any right to expect. he claimed the percocet helped, but don’t let that fool you. sebastian is as tough as he is kind, calm and open. he seemed to be dealing with the hospital very well, though when i arrived the TV remote control was broken and he claimed to miss sitting in his backyard at home.

thanks, sebastian. get all the jello and ice chips you can stand, and then get home to your comfy chair in the backyard safely and quickly.

ramping up to a new website design i’ve been spending some time this week searching through old archives for things i might’ve overlooked before. the other day i came across this out-take of flavor flav from 2004. originally shot for a short-lived and well-intentioned publication called “pink and the almighty”, at the time i had printed only close ups of flav. the shoot took place on the sunset strip, in an alley behind one of the clubs where flav was performing that night. somehow he arrived almost two hours late, and with an entourage of bodyguards and a video crew following him around. the bodyguards didn’t seem especially mirthful, so i refrained from asking how it was that a guy who perpetually wears a two foot clock around his neck could end up being late to everything. maybe he’s looking at the time upside down.

in addition to being late, flav also forgot to wear a belt. as such he had to hold his pants up with one hand or they’d fall down around his ankles. a bodyguard who was three times my size firmly implied that i should only shoot flav from the waist up so nobody would see that he was holding up his own pants. of course, from that point on all i wanted was a photo of flav holding up his pants.

most of what i got instead was flav being. . . well, flavor flav. campy, over the top, mugging for the camera, playing the role of the good natured hip hop buffoon. looking back over the take the other day, though, i found this shot from the very beginning of the session and there was just something so different about it, something peaceful and quiet and unlike anything else i saw out of flav that day. thankfully none of the bouncers saw me get a wide shot.

coming up for air after a few very busy months, i’ve been going back through things and find there are just a whole lot of straggler images from 2010 (and the first part of this year) that i’ve yet to post. in the next several weeks i hope to catch up a bit, including starting in for real on an overhaul of the main portfolio site. then again, i’ve been saying that for months now and find it all too easy to get distracted by more pressing concerns.

anyway, toward that end, here are a couple pictures of my father from right around the end of the year.

more to follow shortly.