Here comes Gathering of the Juggalos post 3 of 6. I told you 7 the other day because there is a 7th post, but I will be posting in a couple weeks or something because it’s not exactly part of this coverage and I wanna get a couple other posts up before I drop it. Anyway we got Gathering Bands today and then one post a day until Monday and then we can all move on with our lives. Deal?

Okay so this could take me forever but I am technically on vacation so I am just gonna do this as fast as possible so it’s gonna be mostly a list of artists I photographed in order with a couple of notes. Also, I only shot the mainstage this year. I am too old to spend 12 hours at a music festival unless I am getting paid way more than I was to shoot the Gathering. Sorry. 

I got there a bit late on Wednesday so the first artist I photographed was Young Mo$h followed by Shaggy the Airhead who I will shout out cause 1) I dig his clothing line and 2) much more important, he came up to me to tell me how much he likes my photography so he and his clothing gets a shout out. He was followed by the Hatchet Man Project, Scum and Insane Poetry, and horrorcore legend Esham headlined.  

Thursday I missed Darby O’Trill accidentally. I did wanna shoot him cause he’s dating my friend but I fucked up. I did manage to catch Mastamind, the Dayton Family and Merkules. ICP headlined with a throwback set to their House of Horrors show in 1998 which is a tour I actually saw them on because my first ever girlfriend really dug them. Shout out Latiffa.

Friday my old friend Zac Amico was hosting the stage so I got some shots of him doing his thing there including getting stapled in the head. Apparently I missed SalamanderX, but I caught Twisted Insane and Ganksta N-I-P. I was most excited about seeing Rakim which was fucking awesome. It was mixed reaction from juggalos. Too many had no idea who he was, but then others were even more excited than I was. I talked to one older juggalo who should know better who had no idea who he was and he told me he didn’t listen to rap which kinda blew my mind. Anyway, Rakim was by far the musical highlight. Kim Dracula was a favorite of the crowd, someone told me they were a less problematic Marilyn Manson which is a great way to describe anyone. My dude Ouija Macc headlined who I am always psyched to see. 

The last night was a shit show for me. My phone got wet and the charging cable stopped working and I drove to a Walmart to get a wifi charger and I missed the first few artists. My goal was to get back in time for DJ Paul but I just missed the beginning of his set so I wasn’t allowed to take photos up close. I pushed my way into the pit and got a couple from the crowd but then it started pouring rain. I went and hid in a carnival booth and just jammed out to Three Six Mafia hits while keeping my camera gear dry. I also helped a carney put away all his stuffed animals which he really appreciated and told me I could stay dry in there all night. My poncho was in the car but a juggalette gave me one which was awesome of her and I stuck around for Static X. Their front man died since the last time they played the Gathering and it was very weird that they just replaced him with like a cyborg version, but at least it was fun to photograph. ICP closed out the night but it was raining hard and I was exhausted and in pain because I am old and my phone was fucked and I didn’t want to get covered in Faygo because I had to go on vacation and I didn’t want my beach clothes to smell like mildew so I said fuck it and went back to my hotel. If you need any photos of ICP, feel free to look at the other two dozen times I have photographed them.

Okay, that’s it. See you tomorrow with a bunch of night time photos and events.

Click here to see all the music from the 2023 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.

As I mentioned in my last post, we got plenty of NSFW for you this year. I just get a surprisingly large amount of emails from people who want juggalette content and I want to deliver despite how much of a creep I feel sometimes shooting this stuff. I like to think of myself as some sort of journalist, and here we are photographing juggalettes shooting fireworks out of their… look, I am trying my best here.

I shot three NSFW events but the one I shot by far the most photos of was the Miss Juggalette pageant. I think I took over 400 of them plus some video and it was a pretty wild event. My old friend Zac Amico was one of the judges (along with Big Jay Oakerson, Angela Mazzanti and a 4th judge I feel terrible that I don’t know the name of) and I told him that Miss Juggalette can be really boring or completely insane and I was right. It was both.

The event started out pretty slowly with a ton of contestants and everyone just answering Clownvis’ random questions about themselves, but once the talent part of the contest started it got deeply weird. Some of the talents involved singing which didn’t go over well (except the opera singer!) and the three people who did balloon animals were not everyone’s cup of tea, but then there was a girl who did a dance routine that was “interrupted” by her getting a bucket of blood thrown on her (which caused every contestant to slip and slide around the stage and attracted dozens of bees). After that things got weirder and weirder, you had a graphic strip routine by Tat2Barbie, a woman who sat on a 2 liter of Faygo, a juggalette who was just slapping people and of course our fireworks shooting friend. 

The swimsuit contest was just an excuse for nearly everyone to get naked and it just devolved from there. The contest ended with everyone just dancing on stage in various states of undress. The crowd was pretty pumped. 

In the end Tat2Barbie won and cried and I got such a great shot of her, but I can’t post it on here cause we live in a puritanical nightmare, but you can check it out on my paywalled site of course. 

Speaking of the paywall situation, this gallery has 50 safe for work images. The actual gallery has nearly 200!! So that means there are 150 photos I shot that are too NSFW to post on here. I also posted a video of the event that is free if you are a member (or $5 if you aren’t). It’s only a minute long because I was shooting photos, but it’s pretty crazy. 

By the way, if you were in the contest, and want your photos, reach out to me on Instagram or Twitter and I will send you your photos. I would say email, but I don’t trust you motherfuckers, I need proof it’s you.

Okay, now click here to see the SFW 2024 Miss Juggalette pageant photos.

Or click here to see the NSFW ones.

It’s finally here! The first gallery of the 2024 Gathering of the Juggalos. I hear from people all the time that these are the photos they are waiting all year for so I am glad I can deliver once again. For those somehow not in the know, the Gathering of the Juggalos is a four day music festival that is (usually) at Legend Valley campground in Thornville Ohio. The festival is thrown by the Insane Clown Posse for their fans, juggalos. I shot over 4000 photos that I have edited down to about 800 for you guys. I have seven posts featuring nine galleries and plenty of NSFW stuff. I hope you dig it. 

To start with, we of course have photos with juggalos. This gallery features the portraits of juggalos, during the daytime. We are going to have a post with all the night time stuff so there will be more portraits in there so if I took your picture and you are looking for it, there’s still a lot more to go. This actually brings me to a good point, which is that I love shooting this event for two totally different audiences. I love that juggalos love to see their photos here, but I also love that people on the outside love looking at this stuff. 

The Gathering of the Juggalos is honestly the place I feel most appreciated as a photographer. I almost feel like a celebrity there. I can’t tell you how many people want a selfie or just wanna tell me how much they love my photography. That shit really makes me feel good when I have spent most of the year since I moved just feeling very uninspired. But the thing I appreciate the most is the juggalos who tell me how much it means to them that while I have photographer juggalos for a lot of major media outlets, I am never there to clown them, no pun intended. Hearing from photography subjects that they think I paint them (again no pun intended) in a fair light is a great compliment for a journalist. I think over the last 15 or so years I have tried to do my best to show that juggalos are more than how they have been treated in the media, and I honestly think that I have had an impact on the way people see juggalos.

Okay, enough of me blowing myself, let’s get into this. Despite shooting 4000 photos I actually tried to take it easy this year. I didn’t shoot much of the daytime stuff, aside from a few of the NSFW events because I know what you guys need from me. I would come down each night between 5 and 6pm to catch the dusk and the best light, then shoot the bands and then go the fuck back to my hotel because I am old and I hate shooting with a flash these days. I did cover a few after midnight things, but we will get to that later.

Okay. like I said, this is a gallery of juggalo portraits. My favorite shots from this gallery were already up on Brooklyn Vegan, there’s a ton more shots that I didn’t give them as well. Also, I should mention that all the NSFW photos from the Gathering are going to be unfortunately behind a paywall. I have explained this before but my gallery system broke and I don’t have the skill or money to fix it, so I have been posting stuff on Flickr. Flickr won’t let you post adult content anymore, so that leaves the most fun photos reserved for Girls of Driven By Boredom. Obviously, I like it when you give me money, but it legit pisses me off that I am in this situation. I got a ton of good shots this year that have a bit of nudity and I wish I could share them with everyone. One of these days I will get the money together to redo my website, but for now my pay site is as cheap as the site will let me so you guys can sign up and you will get decades of nudes and juggalette coverage. Just saying. Seriously 5 of my 9 galleries are paywalled, and one of them is already up, so get over there already.

Now click here to see juggalo portraits at the 2024 Gathering of the Juggalos!

On Saturday, I went to Pepe Fest, a festival honoring one of the most infamous memes, thrown by Beeple at his studio in Charleston, SC. Now if you know what all of those words mean, you can skip the next five paragraphs because I am gonna drop a Pepe/Beeple for Dummies, given that most of my readers will have no fucking idea what is going on.

Okay, let’s start with Pepe The Frog. Pepe was a character created by an artist named Matt Furie for a comic book called Boy’s Club. Boy’s Club was about a bunch of animals living together and partying just being dudes (look, I have never actually read the comic, I hope that is a fair description). In one strip Pepe is caught peeing with his pants pulled all the way down and when confronted about why he did that he said “Feels Good Man”. Those three words spurned a meme that would eventually spiral out of control, used by 4chan trolls to express the worst possible views and became a symbol of the alt right and the rise of Trumpism in 2016. 

Matt Furie was pretty pissed about this, and there’s a good documentary about the lengths he took to get the good name of Pepe back. It’s appropriately titled Feels Good Man and is a good dive into the alt right and the rise of Trump meme culture, incells and 4chan in general. I do think Furie’s efforts paid off, because these days Pepe is almost entirely used in a positive, or at least harmless ways. I don’t think I saw any memes all weekend that I thought were too fucked up. 

One thing the documentary barely touches on is the very early days of digital art on the block chain. There is one scene where a crypto bro in a Lambo buys a jpg for $39k which seemed absolutely crazy in 2019. That same jpg sold in 2021 for nearly 10x that. But the documentary doesn’t go deep into “Rare Pepes”. Despite listening to people talk about Rare Pepe’s for three days straight I don’t know enough about the history not to just quote Wikipedia, so just read that.

Quickly though, the first Rare Pepe’s were minted in 2016 on the Bitcoin blockchain, which predated Ethereum NFTs by about a year. You could create your own, and sell them for Pepe Cash and then use that to buy other Rare Pepes. Eventually there was a Fake Rares collection and now there are Notable Pepes on Ethereum and a billion other Pepe NFTs that little the internet. There is also a $PEPE coin that I bought $20 of for the meme and then sold for like a grand after I forgot about it for a year. I’d say I wish I bought more, but if I had I probably would have sold it way before it 50xed. 

Now that Pepe has been explained, we also have to talk about Beeple. Beeple is the alias of Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist who started uploading one artwork every day and has been doing that every day since 2007. In 2020 he started selling his Everydays as NFTs and sold an image of his first 5000 Everydays for $69 million dollars in 2021 at the peak of the NFT bubble. He has used that money to buy a massive art space in Charleston, SC which we will get to in a minute. 

Okay, this is where you can jump back in if you want to just know about the party and not the very basic explanation about what the hell is going on. So when I moved to Wilmington, NC the first thing I did was find out what actual cities were in driving distance. Raleigh was close, only two hours away. Charlotte was a little farther, but still an easy drive and finally Charleston, SC, the one city of the three that I had never been to. I was immediately looking for an excuse to get down there, so when I saw Beeple was throwing a party at his insane studios I had to go.

You had to own some Pepe stuff to get in, and I didn’t really qualify for a ticket. I bought back a little of the $PEPE I sold so I could RSVP, but there as also a Pepe art submission. Despite going to art school, I am trash at drawing, so I knew I wasn’t getting in that way, but if AI is good for anything, it’s good for making low effort art. One day I had the phrase “Be the meme you want to see in the world” suck in my head and I had MidJourney shit out a photo of a vaguely Pepe looking frog looking in the mirror and I had made a meme. I made it before AI got good at Pepe, and I just made it to post on Twitter or something, but when I saw the Pepe contest, I just dug around my computer until I found it and sent it in, not expecting to get picked but I did.

Side note, I minted it as a free NFT just so I could give it to people at the festival, but I forgot about it, so if you want to mint one for some reason, it’s still open for a few days. 

So because I got my art into the show I got invited to an artist dinner on Friday night and an artist brunch on Sunday. I felt super out of place on Friday. I knew one person and am not invested in Pepe culture so I was just sort of standing around for a bit of it and I ended up leaving early, but it was still a really cool thing and I met a bunch of people which made me slightly less awkward the next day at the actual Fest. It’s really funny that I have spent my entire life in an incredibly social field and was never uncomfortable in any space, but shit like this gets me. 

On Saturday I went over to Beeple Studios and it was fucking incredible. The museum section was closed but the event space was absolutely insane. You will see the pictures, but imagine a room the size of a basketball gym but three of the four walls are covered in massive digital screens. The support beams are covered in screens and even the tables had screens. It was really amazing. 

I brought my camera but it was so dark in there and I left my flash in the car. I wasn’t trying to take the shuttle bus back to my car to grab it so I made due and took a few photos of the space, and some of the speakers and stuff. A woman named Pepelangelo was doing a live painting and had a whole wall of her images of Pepe as masterpieces. The Venus Devouring Pepe Goya homage was my favorite. There was some other physical art as well and that room was will lit so I got photos there. Inside the space they had Pepes on the walls, including mine, but there were so many I only saw mine twice. They also had speakers talking about Pepe and Rare Pepe’s and memes and all sorts of stuff. There was also a Pepe art contest and the four winners got to draw live later that night. 

There was a four hour break in between events. I tried to go to a museum but I got there 20 min before closing so I just walked around downtown Charleston for almost two hours. It was 99% humidity and like 95 degrees out so not the most enjoyable time, but it was cool to see the city. I got some food and cleaned up at my hotel room before heading back out.

The night event was infinitely cooler than the day time one and I was really impressed by the day time. First of all the gallery/museum section was open and it was awesome to see Beeple’s art in real life. He does a lot of pop culture stuff, but like, with dicks, so you might not think it would work in a museum setting, but it really does. Seeing the 5000 Everyday’s across a massive wall was amazing. His collection of old computers was pretty great as well. 

There was a Pepe costume contest so a ton of people were dressed up, but Beeple also had a bunch of people walking around with incredibly realistic masks on making them look like celebrities but because you have to wear the masks over your head they are slightly too big which ads to the uncanny valley aspect and just made them look so cursed. There were also Pepe’s walking Boston Dynamics robot Pepe dogs and three people in Beeple masks. It was also super unsettling in the best possible way. 

There was a scavenger hunt for Pepe swag (I ended up with a pretty sick frog hat that my girlfriend told me she will leave me if I wear in public), an outdoor patio with a giant inflatable Pepe, and a Cyber Truck for some reason. OG Pepe artist Rare Scrilla DJd Pepe themed music. The live drawing contest had the tablets projected on the screens so you could see people work from anywhere and the winner won $5000, I think, it’s possible they just won an oversized check and some shoes, I didn’t look into it. The costume contest happened super quick, for $1000, but it gave us some of the best photos of the night. 

Beeple also made Everyday #6311 live from the event. He has a terminal set up in the middle of the room and you can watch him work on a screen on the other side of the terminal, but then it was also projected on the walls. He gave himself a 30 min timer and then it was uploaded to the internets almost immediately. 

At the end of the night, after the costume contest, printers in the ceiling shot out prints of the four art contest entries as well as Everyday #66311 and a few other Pepe themed Beeple Everydays that were numbered to just 7. People crawled all over each other to grab them. I grabbed one and it was the artist who won the contest. He was standing right in front of me and I asked him if he wanted it and he did so I gave it away. The karma paid off later when the one person I knew at the event gave me one of the Beeple prints. He was signing them, but the line was crazy so I just went back to my hotel room. 

I did bring it to the brunch though and he ended up signing it there. The brunch felt so different to the dinner. I didn’t feel awkward anymore and had a great time. I met some rad people and talked to Beeple for a bit. Plus I had several biscuits. Look, I don’t know why I am talking about Biscuits when this thing is nearly 2000 words already and I have a 6am flight to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos, but here we are. Let’s just get to some pictures.

Click here to see all my photos from 2024 Pepe Fest at Beeple Studios in Charleston, SC.

When I was in Vegas for the AVN Awards I found a staircase in a parking garage I really wanted to photograph someone naked on. I spent two days trying to make that happen but people were busy and it was a long walk in heels. I ran into my friend Dylan Moore (who you can see more of here) at the ALF party and we talked about shooting again, so when I ran into her as the tradeshow was ending the next day I asked her if she wanted to hit that stairwell, and we did it.

But after that we decided to go back to her hotel to take even more photos. I couldn’t stay long but we took a bunch of fun photos that you are hopefully about to look at. She did splits on furniture, she jumped off of TV stands (she moved the TV), she changed twice and I just captured the madness. I honestly barely got out of the chair and she did all the work which is honestly my favorite type of shoot. Sometimes when I am shooting in a hotel room after shooting other shit all day, I just want to lay down and try and find reasons to shoot from the hotel bed. Yes I am that lazy, but also it makes butts look good so everyone wins.

Also, I haven’t shot any nudes since this Vegas trip. It sucks. I don’t know what to shoot in North Carolina and I went to NYC on the weekend before 4th of July and everyone was out of town. I need to get back to LA soon just to shoot (and see my newborn niece) but in the meantime I am just stretching out the NSFW content I do have. I still have one more shoot to go, and it’s a good one. But it’s also of Dylan from the first time we shot. So I need to find at least one more shoot to post before I post those right? So if anyone knows any naked people within two hours of Wilmington, NC, let a guy know. I am not ready to retire quite yet.

As per usual, all these photos are gonna be on my pay site, Girls of Driven By Boredom. I realize I just told you that I won’t have anything new for a bit, but I am gonna start reuploading old shoots there in high res, but there are also tens of thousands of nudes on there already so sign up. Thanks!

Now click here to see all the photos of Dylan Moore in her Vegas hotel room.

When I found out my friend Doug died, it didn’t fully hit me right away. I have lost far too many friends and when I first found out I though that maybe I was just permanently broken. The sadness I felt was more about the pain of life, how unfair it was for another one of my people to be gone, than it was the pain of his death. Later that day I found out another, less close, friend had died and the sadness I felt was compounded by the guilt for not feeling more.

That night I went to dinner with my girlfriend and this pressure of sorrow was weighing me down. She wanted to talk to me about Doug, who she never got to meet, but I didn’t want to talk about anything. I didn’t even want to eat. But I couldn’t not talk about Doug and I started telling her story after story about our friendship and how much he meant to my life and I broke down in the restaurant, crying into my food. I was just glad to be feeling something. 

I found out that Doug died a week ago, but I couldn’t write this post for so many reasons. I didn’t want to break down again of course, but I also had just so many things to tell you about Doug, so many stories, so many ways he impacted my life, I didn’t know how to do it. I wrote over 1200 words and deleted almost all of it because it just felt like a review of our friendship, just a list of things with links to old blog posts like footnotes in a research paper. It didn’t feel right, so here I am starting over again. Doug deserves that, and our mutual friends reading this deserve that. I have sadly become known for posts like these, and it helps me process, but I know how much these posts have meant to other people and I need to get this right. 

So let’s start at the beginning, skip to the end and then just write some more.

My friendship with Doug starts more than 20 years ago during the very early days of this website. I started it in 2001 and very quickly it became popular enough that I realized I could get free stuff if I blogged about it, so I would reach out to companies I loved and often would get sent products. One of those companies was Troma, a low budget, b-horror film studio that I am going to assume you are familiar with if you are reading a post about Doug. 

In 2002 Troma sent me a VHS screener copy of a documentary called All The Love You Cannes. The movie was about the Troma team trying to get the word out about their company at the Cannes Film Festival by any means necessary. They caused absolute chaos and the star of the film was a man named Doug Sakmann who managed to get kicked out of his hotel room and piss off (and on) his own coworkers with his insane behavior. It was so goddamn funny and 22 year old me was obsessed. After I wrote about the movie I emailed the link to Troma and I realized the guy I had been emailing with was the same Doug as the one in the movie. I told him he was my hero. 

From then on we stayed in touch, but it wasn’t until 2006 when I moved to NYC that we met at a Halloween party where he was hosting his “world’s most dangerous game show” Strip for Pain. By that point he had left Troma and moved to Philly to start his own company, Backseat Conceptions, but he would come up for events all the time and I made sure to see him pretty much every time he was in town. Never once did we live in the same city but we became very close and he impacted my life in so many huge ways despite the distance. 

Doug would come up at least twice a year to throw the NYC Zombie Crawl and as long as I was in town would photograph it, most of the time for free, despite hating it. The first few were a blast and I got crazy photos, but how many times can you photograph the same thing before you hate coming home sticky and smelling like pancake syrup from all the fake blood. Still, I would do anything for Doug and it was a chance to see him and we always talked about doing a zombie crawl book together.

After the pandemic Doug stopped doing zombie crawls. Events were canceled for a long time and by the time they came back he was dealing with his own losses in life. I injured my back, got wifed up and stopped going out so even if Doug was in town I am not sure I would have made it out. I still kept in touch with Doug via social media and the occasional text but I hadn’t heard his voice until a few weeks ago when he called me to tell me the Zombie Crawl was coming back and he wanted me to send him a bunch of photos for a gallery show around the event. He told me he was finally getting out of his depression after losing his brother and wanted to start doing things again. We talked about new Troma movies and a touring gallery show and finally doing that zombie crawl book. It was so great to hear from him and we talked for a really long time. 

It took me a while to go through all my zombie photos but I sent him an edit of a few hundred. It took him a while to get the selects back to me and it took me a while to edit them and send him the high res photos. I finally got them back to him almost exactly one week before he died. On June 23rd, three days before his death I landed in NYC at 9am. It was the day of the Mermaid Parade, an event I somehow never photographed in all the years I lived in NY. I was gonna go with my friend Mike but he had an emergency and couldn’t make it and I was exhausted so I just took a nap instead of going all the way out to Coney Island. The next day I saw Doug posted on Instagram that he was at the parade. If only I had seen it I would have been there in a second, spending one last day with my friend I hadn’t seen in way too long. But I didn’t see it and I cannot tell you how much I regret it. Tears are bouncing off my keyboard just thinking about it.

In my early days of living in New York I called Doug while he was on his way home from the AVN Awards where he got kicked out of another hotel for chaotic behavior. He had drunkenly punch a slot machine and they kicked him out even though he paid for the machine. He decided to come back wearing a fake mustache and they arrested him. It seemed hilarious to me at the time. I was really jealous of someone who could just be so punk rock and not give a fuck. He didn’t have a care in the world about any of it. I turned that phone call with him into an interview I titled Doug Sakmann: American Hero.

Doug really was my hero. When we first met it was because he was an absolute maniac and I loved that. I have so many great Doug stories from those days but as crazy as Doug was, what made him my hero was his ability to get everything done in the midst of all that chaos. I remember the exact moment my whole view of Doug changed. It was 2008 and I came to Philly for the Basckseat Film Festival he was throwing. We spent all night partying with porn stars and doing god knows what. At some point Doug passed out and I was a little worried because he had a film festival to run. I was totally sober but he was the one who woke me up the next morning and he was a completely different person. I spent the morning with him and just watched him run the festival like a goddamn professional. He was so impressive to watch, commanding an army of volunteers despite being on three hours of drunken sleep. 

Late during zombie crawls one minute Doug would be swinging off a light post spraying fake blood out of a Super Soaker on to the crowd below and the next minute he would be inevitably be talking to the police, assuring them that all of this was absolutely normal. I have never met anyone so out of control and so in control at the exact same time. He invited me to be in a Troma movie in 2018 and I couldn’t make it on the dates they needed me, but I did spend a day as an (unpaid) extra just for the experience. Doug was running the show, making Lloyd Kaufman’s job as easy as possible, while also setting off insane special effects. It was this ability to create order out of chaos that made me hire him as a produce for every ad campaign I have ever done.

If you knew Doug, you don’t need me to tell you this but Doug wasn’t just fun, he wasn’t just a good producer, but he was also about the nicest friendliest dude you could imagine. He would literally give you the shirt off his back. Every post I have read memorializing him has talked about how wonderful of a fucking human he was. His last ever text to me was wishing me happy birthday and telling me that he loved me. I was on a midlife crisis, self loathing birthday shit and didn’t even bother to text him back. We are almost the exact same age and his birthday is coming up and I won’t even be able to repay the favor, but I hope he knows how much I loved him. Fuck, there are those tears again.

This post is almost 2000 words at this point and I still want to drop you guys a bunch of links so you can go back and look at all the fun times we had together. I documented almost all of it. I just want to tell you how much he impacted my life. He introduced me to one of my first friend groups in New York even though he wasn’t even living there. He’s the reason I went to the AVN Awards for the first time which completely changed my career. He introduced me to Lloyd Kaufman who is another hero of mine, and because of that connection I got to shoot my only Village Voice cover despite freelancing there for a decade. I partied with Jackasses, movie stars, porn stars and professional eaters with Doug. We got our logos tattooed to each other. He snuck me into Comic Con, he booked the best show of my short lived musical career, and he even convinced me to go to a fucking baseball game. I should also note, that my website is deeply broken so many of the galleries don’t work, but at least you get the stories and some of the pictures. 

It took me almost a week just to get started with this post and then four more days to finish it. I spent hours just looking for photos of Doug, trying to find a handful without zombie makeup on him. I have so few photos of him when he wasn’t “on”. I think part of that was the nature of our relationship, 90% of the time we hung out it was at some big event, or we were working. I guess I just wasn’t shooting photos during the downtime. I only found a couple of photos of him and I together. He was always in front of the camera, and I was always behind it. I fucking miss you so much man. I am so fucking sad your gone, and I am so sorry I didn’t text you back telling you how much I loved you too. 

Click here to see over 100 photos I have taken of my brother and hero Doug Sakmann over the years.

Hello! I am back with some “new” pictures that I took back in January during the AVN Awards week. I am settling nicely into my new North Carolina life but between the move and getting the new place together I really haven’t taken very many photos. It’s a super weird experience for me but I have recently come into some dumb crypto money so my priority has been on getting used to my move and not working, but that’s not really a long term situation so hopefully I’ll get back to traveling and taking wild photos and all that shit. Meanwhile, I have some photos of my old pal Heidi V and her friend Nova Hawthorne. 

I met Heidi years ago and we have taken photos a few times now and she’s always an awkward joy to photograph. She’s very fun and for the second time brought me a pretty friend to take photos with as well. Nova Hawthorne was staying with Heidi during the AVNs so one day I went up to their room to take photos. The light sucked so we pulled out one of their webcam lights and made it work. They are pretty bad technically because that’s kinda my thing, but you can tell the girls are having a blast and capturing actual fun is also kinda my thing.

All the photos below are very cute, but there are also some pretty sexy photos as well, but you gotta go to Girls of Driven By Boredom for those. Sorry but those are the rules. Anyway, I am gonna get back organizing my office, watering all my plants, feeding my fish and whatever else I do in my new weird life. 

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of Heidi V and Nova Hawthorne!

Last summer I photographed Jade Baker for the half dozenth time. I love taking her photo and when she told me she was staying at the Chelsea Hotel I got over there as quickly as possible. We shot a ton of photos and I was really happy with them and was ready to put them up, but she then was going through a rebrand to “Rosie Jones” so I waited to upload them for a couple of weeks.

By the time she had announced her new name I got the 35mm back and I loved it, so I abandoned the digitals and I uploaded the film photos with the announcement about her new name. So months go by, I get busy, I upload other stuff, I plan a move, I move, I spend a month unpacking and during all of this I end up completely forgetting about these digital photos and they just languished on my hard drive until now!

So we have a ton of really fun photos of Jade, who is once again going by Jade, in an absolutely iconic location that I am so glad I got to photograph in before I moved. It wouldn’t have felt right.

On some quick housekeeping notes, I have now been living in Wilmington, NC for five weeks and I still don’t have my office fully set up, but the last piece of office furniture is being delivered today and then I will get my printers and my postage scale and all that boring shit set up so I can start shipping stuff again. A lot of my merch is still hard to get to at the moment as my closet is just full of garbage but by next week I should be ready to go. You can stuff order now, and it should ship early next week. 

Also, these photos of Jade and the 35mm version of this shoot and hundreds of other shoots are all available on Girls of DBB. I don’t have an OnlyFans anymore so that is the only place to get my NSFW content. I am not really working right now as I get my life together, so signing up for that site helps me a ton. It’s pretty cheap, especially if you sign up for a few months at a time. 

Now click here to see all the uncensored digital photos of Jade Baker at the Chelsea Hotel.