Malice McMunn Dwarves Print

My friend Malice got breast cancer recently and had a double mastectomy. She’s a dancer and a model and so it has not only been a horrible experience but she’s missing out on work. She has a GoFundMe you can donate to but if you want something to go with your kindness I am selling a print of a photo from an album cover to raise a little money for her, but first I wanted to tell you a little about how we met.

Malice is an iconic model in the punk world and I had wanted to take her photo forever but I didn’t know her or anything. Back in early 2013 I was in Vegas covering the AVN Awards for Hustler Magazine. Despite Hustler’s reputation, they were one of my favorite clients and sort of let me pick my own assignments. I pitched them on a behind the scenes shoot where I would photograph porn stars getting ready for the awards, hanging out in their hotel rooms, etc. I have done similar stories for Vice as and the Daily Beast as well, but let’s just say there was a lot more nudity in the Hustler article.

Anyway, as I am walking around the convention I run into Bonnie Rotten. I had actually met her a year earlier and we followed each other on Twitter and stuff and she had sort of blown up since then. I told her I was doing this thing for Hustler and asked if she wanted to be part of it. She was down and told me to come by her hotel room the next morning because she was getting her makeup done early and that would be the perfect time to do the shoot.

So when I get there Malice is also there getting her makeup done! Turns out Malice was there hanging out with Bonnie while she was off doing her famous porn star thing. I told Malice I was a big fan and after I was done shooting with Bonnie I asked her if she was down to get in a few shots. I ended up taking this photo I absolutely love of them on a couch just wearing fur coats that ended up in my book Instaxxx.

Around that same time I meet this guy who runs a record label and it turns out he had put out some records for this punk band The Dwarves. They just happen to be one of my favorite bands of all time, and most of their album covers have a naked woman on the cover. I told the guy if he ever put out another Dwarves record I would love to submit some photos for the cover which he could use for free.

Fast forward a year later and he hits me up. He is releasing an album of a Dwarves live radio show appearance called Radio Free Dwarves. They need a cover that is somehow radio themed. The art direction I get is they want to shoot in an actual radio station with a girl naked except for a ski mask. They want me to find the model and the location and shoot for free. If it was nearly any other band I would have told them to fuck off, but I just happened to be in LA, so I reached out to Brian Redban who ran Joe Rogan’s podcast studio when it was in LA and he said we could shoot there.

Now I just needed a model and I immediately thought of Malice. She’s so iconic in the punk scene and I just thought she would be perfect for it. This was all so last minute and we almost didn’t make it because of scheduling and LA traffic but we pulled it off. I think I had to pick Malice up and drop her off too. The entire budget for the shoot was $100 which I gave to Malice and she only did it for that because she was a big Dwarves fan as well.

The funny thing is after all that they didn’t even use any of the radio themed photos. The photo they used was just shot up against a white wall. There is a “brown bag” special edition record which has a VERY NSFW outtake from the shoot that is much more radio themed, but the photo that ended up on the main record, tape and CD release (plus a poster and a skateboard) has nothing radio themed on it.

I realize this is way too long, but Malice rules, we have become friends since 2013. Last time I saw her, which was way too long ago, I got to go “hiking” with her and her mini dobermans up Runyon Canyon. But yea I just wanted to do something for her and here’s a chance to do something good for a wonderful person and also get one of my prints cheap. The photo is unretouched and uncensored. They are $50 each, signed (by me) and numbered to just 13.

I posted about these on social media a week ago and they are almost all sold out but my website got hacked and so I couldn’t post about it on here so I wanted to do that and hopefully we can sell the last few copies….

Speaking of last few copies, I am on my last box of my previously mentioned book Instaxxx. It’s taken ten years to sell out, but we are so close, so if you have ever wanted a copy of that book you can get that at the same place where you can buy the Malice print, shopdbb.com.

Also, I uploaded a bunch of very NSFW 35mm outtakes from the Dwarves cover shoot to Girls of Driven By Boredom and I will donate a few bucks to Malice from every new signup to that site over the next 72 hours. Actually if any copies of Instaxxx sell in the next 72 hours I will donate a few dollars from each book sale as well.

So yeah, go get your uncensored Malice McMunn Dwarves print and/or your copy of Instaxxx here and if art isn’t for you and you just wanna see some dirty photos, you uncultured swine, sign up for Girls of DBB here!

On Robert Duvall

Robert Duvall died last week and I was lucky enough to get to photograph him a few times. I was a huge fan of his work and I was so grateful for the brief moments I got to spend with him. I wanted to write something in his honor, but you can read about his incredible career anywhere and I didn’t know him well enough to tell you about who he truly was as a person. Instead I will use his passing to tell you a few stories about my handful of interactions with him as well as a few unrelated stories about one of my all time favorite jobs which gave me access to some of my favorite actors and filmmakers, none more often than Robert Duvall.

In 2010 I was covering South By Southwest for a bunch of alt weekly newspapers that were all owned by Village Voice Media (The Voice, LA Weekly, Miami New Times, SF Weekly, etc). I had been going to SXSW for many years at that point, originally because I managed a band in college, and then in 2008 and 2009 as a photographer, but I had mostly only paid attention to the Music part of the festival. But in 2010 the Voice was sponsoring a few parties at SXSW that year including a SXSW Interactive party, so my media pass wasn’t just for the Music part of the festival. It covered all three parts of the fest, Music, Interactive and Film. And that’s when the press emails started. Because so many bands play the festival SXSW didn’t give out media contacts, but that was not the case for the film fest. I started getting email after email inviting me to interview the directors and actors of different films. I had an idea… I started writing them back saying that I didn’t want to interview anyone, but I wanted 5 minutes to take their portrait. It worked and for the next five years I would shoot an apparently very popular gallery of SXSW Film Portraits for Village Voice Media.

And that’s how I came to meet Robert Duvall. That first year people were a bit weary of the idea I think. These days media outlets set up photo booths at festivals and award shows at the time, but I don’t think people really got the idea until I could link them to my 2010 gallery. I remember being excited to meet Mark Duplass, mostly because we had a bunch of friends in common, and I thought it was really cool that I got to photograph Kinky Friedman (it’s fine, you can google him). I got to shoot some bigger celebrities on the red carpets (MacGruber premiered at SXSW that year) but the only really big names I got to photograph were all in the same film: Get Low.

Get Low starred Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall and all three of them were going to be available to me for a quick photo shoot. (Sissy Spacek side note: I once wrote a Carrie porn parody for my ex who directed it. It was AVN nominated!) I couldn’t believe I was going to meet any of those actors, much less all of them. Their shoot was my first one of the day and I was staying north of downtown at my buddy Mike’s place. He was at work and I didn’t have a car so I called a cab and 30 minutes later it still hadn’t showed up. I called the film’s publicist to tell him what had happened and he was surprisingly cool about it. I guess he saw the vision for the shoot and told me to come that afternoon at the end of the day. I was so relieved.

When I got there to shoot I was stressed the fuck out. Their day was running late and the publicist said I would have literally five minutes. I on the plus side while I waited I got to hang out with Sissy Spacek’s musician daughter while who was a total babe (and I actually ran into her in NYC a few months later). When it was finally time for the shoot I was introduced to the cast and that’s when Bill and Robert absolutely ripped into me for being late. They were joking about it, and in retrospect it was hilarious but at the time I was so fucking nervous. I had photographed a bunch of celebrities at that point in my career, but it was all at events or in other social settings where I was a lot more comfortable. Not only was I photographing three massive celebrities, all of whom I loved, but because it was the last thing of the day all the people working on the press junket were just standing around watching me do the shoot.

I took them outside behind the hotel and now I had even more people watching. I lined the three of them up for a group shot and then tried to take solo photos of them as well but they were just talking to each other and other people around them and joking around and I was honestly too intimidated to tell them to do anything. Bill was easy because he was just kinda putting on a show, but Robert and Sissy were so close together that it was hard to get solo shots. I got in really close to them and Sissy said “You’re so close!” and I was like “don’t worry I have a wide lens” and she said something along the lines of “I look terrible wide!” I showed her the photo I took and for some reason she absolutely loved it.

Later that day Get Low premiered and I decided I would shoot the red carpet. I hate shooting red carpets, I have no interest in getting the same photo that twenty other photographers have, but if you want to see a big movie at SXSW you have to wait in a line for an hour or more, but they let all the press in after the red carpet so whenever I wanted to see a movie I would just shoot the step and repeat instead of waiting in line. Sissy Spacek showed up first and when she saw me on the red carpet she ran over to me and gave me a big hug and then announced to the other press that I was an amazing photographer. I cannot tell you how good that felt and it’s honestly the only reason I am telling you this part, but don’t worry there’s a funny Robert Duvall tidbit as well. Robert was next up and while he was posing Bill Murray showed up. He of course was making a scene and all the photographers stopped pointing their cameras at Robert and aimed them on Bill, myself included. That’s when Robert Duvall quickly flipped off all the photographers and every one of us missed it. He started laughing so hard and made some joke about how we should have been paying attention to him. Robert Duvall was such a serious actor but whenever I think about him he’s laughing.

Years go by before I see Robert again, but over the next few years I become friendly with his publicist. Because the photos were published in the LA Weekly they seemed to get a lot of attention out there and suddenly a lot more people were getting back to my emails requesting access to their stars. I started working with the same publicists year after year and I would shoot their smaller films as favors and they would make sure I got time with their biggest stars. I told you I would use this as an excuse to tell some stories so let’s do a speed round of name dropping celebrity stories from the six years I did that gallery…

Adrien Brody was really psyched to shoot with me because his mom is the photographer Sylvia Plachy and she was a staff photographer for the Village Voice for decades. Paul Walker was another person who was really excited to talk to me about photography. He didn’t seem to know anything about cameras but he really wanted to talk to me about them. I wish I had that kind of personality. I got to shoot the cast of Silicon Valley which was cool because I had been friends with Kumail Nanjiani at some point but I hadn’t seen him in years. It was great talking to him and TJ Miller about mutuals in the incredible mid 2000s NYC comedy scene. Speaking of which, I shot Reggie Watts with Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric and Michael Cera. I knew Reggie back in the day but he didn’t seem to recognize me so I didn’t say anything and suddenly in the middle of our shoot it clicked and he was like “Wait you are Driven By Boredom!” and he pulled out his phone and he had a bunch of my photos saved in it. Pretty surreal moment. I had an insane moment with Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass (the second time I photographed him) but it’s way too long to tell here. I was once shooting Johnny Knoxville on the street when a bunch of skateboarding teenagers saw us and lost their minds. I ended up incorporating them into the photos. I got to shoot Conan once because I was photographing someone else in his hotel and we rode the elevator down together and briefly made small talk so when we got outside he posed for a few photos. I got to talk to Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper about Bill Mosley’s character in the sequel who is probably my favorite horror character of all time. I got to photograph Brie Larson and Lena Dunham before they were famous (Okay Lena was already a friend of mine, but still counts). I should end this paragraph now before it gets even more namedroppy and self congratulatory but I have so many more stories from those years covering the film festival. But let’s get back to Robert Duvall…

The second time I photographed Robert Duvall was in 2014 for a movie he did called A Night In Old Mexico. We took some photos on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel. Many of the film junkets happened there and so many of my photos were out on that balcony or near by. I tried not to recycle the same location in the same year, but after six years I used that balcony a lot. I didn’t love my Duvall photos that year but the balcony had a Texas flag on it so we did some shots next to that and one of those photos ended up on the cover of Texas Lifestyle Magazine which celebrated Duvall’s work playing a Texan, most famously in Lonesome Dove.

In 2015 Duvall was back with a film called Wild Horses, another Texas tale, and I photographed him and his wife for my last ever Voice Media gallery before the company was sold. But the Voice was not my only client that year, I was actually hired by Duvall to photograph the after party for Wild Horses which was such an honor. I took a ton of photos of him and Josh Hartnett who also starred in the movie, but I also got to hang out with some proper Texas good old boys including Matthew McConaughey who is a wild dude. Honestly he was the life of the party. He and his oil pipe business partner Wayne ‘Butch’ Gilliam must have been at SXSW for a Texas Shark Tank style show called West Texas Investors Club because it came out a few months later and they were the “sharks”.

I should also note that in my original write up of the party I said “Guy Myhill asked me to take a photo of him with his Leica M6 and believe it or not it was the first time I had ever shot with one and ever since then I can’t stop thinking about getting one.” A few months later I did in fact buy an M6 and I have shot with it constantly ever since. So that party had another weird little impact on my life.

That party was the last time I ran into Robert Duvall, but it really reinforced how funny and warm he was and what a commanding presence he had. For such a serious actor, he was such a good time. I can’t say I ever really got to know him, we did quick photo shoots and during the party I mostly observed, but just being around him was enough to get a great impression and I have such good memories of those times in my life and they wouldn’t be the same without Robert Duvall. Thank you for all your incredible movies and the brief moments I got to spend around you.

RIP Martin Parr

My last B-Sides post was about the impact Larry Clark, specifically Kids and Tulsa had on my work, and today I am back to talk about another photographer that had a massive effect on my work, but this time much later in life. Most of the photographers who had a profound impact on my work I discovered in my teens — people like Clark, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and maybe more than anyone, Glen Friedman who made me want to pick up a camera in the first place to photograph the local DC punk bands I was going to see every weekend. The early 2000’s Vice aesthetic got me shooting film again in my 20s and had a big impact on my style in my post college life, but as an adult the photographer who has inspired me the most has to be Martin Parr.

It’s not like I wasn’t familiar with Martin Parr, he was a member of Magnum Photography, a collective of photojournalists, that I always imagined one day joining when I was younger. That might sound particularly hilarious if you know my work, but photojournalism is the really in the background of all my work, even my mediocre nudes. Parr’s book Last Resort, a collection of working class UK seaside photography has been in my collection forever. His use of daylight flash is something I have tried so many times, but just never consistently with a fraction of the skill and vision that Parr has. His book Small World, where he turned the tables on tourists by photographing them, has been in the back of my head for years as well. You can run a direct line from a couple photos in that book to my zine Off The Hook. Photographing people taking photos, especially selfies, has long been apart of my work, and I know a lot of that comes from Parr, even if it was mostly subconsciously.

But let’s be honest, my work doesn’t resemble Parr’s. He didn’t inspire my work in the same way that someone like Friedman or Clark did where you can see their work in mine, but he had a huge impact for two reasons. The first might be obvious if you know anything about Parr or read one of the many tributes to him after his death. He was maybe the biggest proponent of photo books as an art form. He literally wrote the book on them. He published so many of his own books, but also had an insane collection of them that he sold towards the end of his life (They are now at the Tate Modern) to found the Parr Foundation that looks after his archive as well as preserving the work of other important UK photographers. I am a massive photo book collector myself and have published many photo books and zines and I have no idea what any of that would look like without Parr.

And finally we get to maybe the thing he did that most impacted my work, in a way that maybe no one has noticed because it happened so recently, but it just was exactly what I needed. In 2021 Parr released a book with the Anonymous Project called called Deja View. I was already a huge fan of the Anonymous Project, a massive collection of found photography, and at the time I was working with a group of people on a project digitizing found slide film called, Carousel Curated. Parr started pulling photos from his own photography library and matching his own work to found images from the Anonymous Project collection, creating a series of diptychs that made up the book. The images and the connections are so good and feel so effortless, although I know how time consuming it must have been.

When you make books, you think about work in diptychs because you need to find images that work together on opposite pages. It’s honestly one of my favorite parts of making a book and I bet Parr feels the same way. Trying elevate my mediocre work by grouping images together to make something interesting has long been part of my process, my 2014 book Dinner With Igor is the prime example, but ever since flipping through Deja View I have sort of been obsessed with making diptychs out of my work. Now instead of taking a bunch of related images and then trying to find photos that work together after the edit, I have started thinking about the pairs first. It’s a small shift, and maybe not such an obvious one but it’s something I have been thinking about nearly every day for four years.

A about a year after the book came out I did a thread of my images vs Carousel Curated images that I loved. It’s probably the last good thing I did on Twitter before that site became unusable. I recently had a bunch of portraits in an art show here in Wilmington, NC where I showed them all as diptychs. I have also been working on a zine called Vanity that is a collection of license plates with images that work with those plates in obvious and not so obvious ways. I am actually quite excited about that one as it’s a split zine with my fiance. But on top of all that, it’s really just the way I think about images now. I have started taking photos specifically because I could see how they might pair with an image I shot years ago. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but I can’t tell you how much of an impact that book has had on the way I think about my images past and future.

So to honor Martin Parr, I pulled a bunch of his images and paired them with images of mine that hopefully work together. His work is so much stronger than mine that I am not sure this is doing either of us justice, but I had to do it. Thank you so much for everything Martin, you are going to be inspiring photographers for generations.

On Kids, Tulsa, And Larry Clark’s Impact

Earlier this year photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark had a photography show of his early 90’s documentation of the skate scene that led to his seminal film Kids. I was actually in NYC at the time for my now fiance’s knee surgery, but I wasn’t able to make it over to the show because I was taking care of her. Not only was there a show, but Leo Fitzpatrick put together a zine with photographs from that time period and interview with Clark and Tobin Yelland. I am a photobook/zine collector, a Larry Clark collector, and Kids had and outsized impact on my life so I needed that zine.

I sent my friend Ronen down to the gallery for me, but they were sold out of the zine. The gallery told Ronen they were getting more in and they would save a copy for me. I called the gallery a few days later and they were holding onto it for me so I sent my buddy Mike over and he grabbed one. Mission accomplished. And then 7 months went by before I actually made it back to NYC, which is crazy in itself, but long story short, Mike finally gave me the zine last night. As I sat reading it while I was waiting for the train, I started thinking about how much of an impact Kids and Larry Clark had on my life and I basically wrote this post in my head before realizing I should actually write it down. Stuff like this is exactly why I created the “B-Sides” section of my website – a place to write down whatever I am thinking about without worrying about it detracting from my photography work.

In 1994 I was a freshman in high school I started a punk zine and eventually a punk record label. In 1995 I had to take an art class in high school and my mom had a camera so I figured maybe photography would be a good skill to have. I started shooting punk bands and really fell in love with it. These day band photography feels so fucking boring to me, but at the time that was all I wanted to do.

That same year, 1995 Kids came out and it blew my fucking mind. I had never seen a movie that felt real. It was so fucking relatable. I wasn’t a skater, but these were my people. I was living in suburban DC and not downtown Manhattan, but the sex, drugs, violence and boredom were all the exact same. There’s a scene in Kids where Telly and Casper roll up to Washington Square Park and daps up all their friends before they beat the living shit out of someone with skateboards. I used to go up to this fountain all my friends would hang out and do the exact same thing. The girl I lost my virginity to I had met right after she got out of juvie for hitting another girl in the face with a skateboard, trucks first. I once got in a brawl with a whole skate crew where I hit a guy with a baseball bat, had a shovel broken over my back and got knocked out with a beer bottle to the face. Kids felt like my life, only they were way fucking cooler. I knew I had to live in NYC one day… it just took me a decade to get there.

Shortly after I fell in love with Kids my mom gave me a copy of Larry Clark’s book Tulsa. My mom is not normally the type of person to give their teenager a deeply NSFW book about drug addicted teens, but she loves documentary photography and she knew I would love it and she was right. I am guessing if she could do it all over again she probably wouldn’t have, but that book changed my life so dramatically and I don’t think I really knew that until I started thinking about it on the train last night.

A lot of people might look at my work and think I was influenced my Nan Goldin, but I didn’t really find her work until I was in my 20s. Tulsa was the book that made me realize I could make art out of my idiot friends. I never even thought about just documenting my life. I was photographing bands, but not the people looking at the bands. I continued to shoot music, but I also finally turned my attention on my friends. Sadly in 2001 I got a digital camera and the digital photos I took from 2001 until 2008 are absolute trash, but you can trace a direct line from my discovery of Tulsa in the late 90s to the subculture, sex and chaos I have spent my life documenting.

Obviously I have others to thank for that too, many of them from the skateboarding world, the CKY2k videos and even Tom Green had a big impact on turning the lens on my friends. I have so much fucked up video on old DV tapes trying to emulate those pre Jackass skate videos. I remember someone comparing some of my photos to Ed Templeton at some point and I only knew him cause my vegan punk friends would buy his vegan leather skate shoes. When I found his photography after seeing Beautiful Losers in 2008 he instantly became one of my favorite photographers. The reason I got into band photography in the first place is because of my love of Glen Friedman who started photographing punk bands for Skateboarder Magazine and really helped bring those worlds together. I owe my whole life to punk rock, but skate culture is a close second even though I can barely skate.

Not too long ago I had a bunch of old negatives scanned (I have more being scanned as we speak) and it gives a little peek into the nascent stages of my photography career. I have shared some of that work, but I put together a little gallery of that early work from my late teenage years that shows the influence of Kids, Tulsa and Larry Clark. I just wish I had kept this up instead of switching to digital too early. I hope you dig this stuff.