2020 was a fucking disaster and I am pretty sure we don’t need to go into all of that but I like to organize all my photos and pull selects every year so that I can make it easier to find stuff in the future and these throwback posts are a good way to go over some highlights and link to my favorite shoots of the year and 2020 is no exception. 

When I first picked up a camera when I was 15 for a photo class I didn’t really care about it so I only took photos for class and I think I got a C in it. A year later I took photo 2 and I started shooting punk shows and protests and got hooked on photography and it changed my life forever. I never really put down a camera after that… until 2020.

2020 was already slow for me. My roommate died at the end of November and December and most of January were spent just dealing with that shit until I went on my yearly AVN trip. I shot a lot of photos there but between the start of the pandemic last March up until the Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the country at the end of May I took almost no photos at all. I had this very weird mix of feelings. I felt this responsibility to my elderly neighbors and my community to stay inside, but I also felt this massive guilt for not being out in the streets documenting the end of the world as we knew it. For months I pretty much only left the house for essential stuff and I would bring my camera with me whenever I left the house but I didn’t shoot a lot. I tried to document the grafiti and the signage and capture some of the moment (see my zine Sign of the Times) but I didn’t do nearly enough to make me feel productive.

After George Floyd was murdered I felt like I had to hit the streets. This was too important not to be apart of and a video I captured of horrible police violence ended up going viral and being purchased by the NY Times, NY Post and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. Ironically this awful moment ended up being the only paid work I did for most of 2020. I went to a bunch of protests over the summer and documented most of them, but I am embarrassed to admit that I eventually stopped going as the protests started getting smaller and smaller. I did hit the streets again a few months later when TV networks called the presidential race for Biden. It was one of the few highlights of a disastrous year.

I did do some shoots during the pandemic, including this socially distanced shoot, but the vast majority of the stuff I shot in 2020 happened on a less than two week trip in January to LA and Las Vegas when I went out to shoot the AVN Week madness. Heading home from Vegas from that trip was actually the last time I got on a plane after canceling trips to SXSW, the NFL Draft and two tattoo conventions I was supposed to shoot for Monster.

A year ago I shot Carmen when she visited NYC and Phoenix Marie literally the day before lockdown in NYC and over the summer when cases were low I did a day road trip with Nina and Kirra which ended up with some great shots (that you still haven’t seen all of), I did a weird late night shoot with Alex F and of course this shoot with the very flexible Amanda Whip. As far as the LA/Vegas stuff some highlights include the Aiden & Leda photos, my latest shoot with Carter and the super quick shoot I did with Alex Grey right before I came back to NYC forever. 

Right before the world ended I had booked a bunch of the work I mentioned earlier and I bought some bitcoin when it crashed right before the pandemic. I regretted it when I lost the jobs and it took me way too long to get unemployment, but I survived thanks to you guys. I started my OnlyFans and you guys bought my books and zines and had Girls of Driven By Boredom already going (I uploaded a NSFW “Best of” gallery including a bunch of shots not in this gallery). I had someone who supports my work just send me some cash and told me I could pay him in photos later. That shit meant so much to me. 

But things are looking up. That bitcoin I regretted buying is now worth more than 10 times what I paid for it. My unemployment is still going strong while my bills have pretty much decreased to just food, shelter and the cost to host this damn website. I paid off my credit card, got my first vaccine shot, I am finally headed back to LA and Vegas to shoot next month, and amazingly my NFT test run did really well. (I did manage to spent all that money on other people’s NFTs but I got some new stuff coming.) I still haven’t shot much in 2021, but my guess is the last 9 months of this year I am gonna be shooting a lot more than the first three  and I can’t fucking wait wait.

Thank you guys for everything and I hope that all of our 2021s are so much fucking better than 2020. 

In the meantime, click here to see a huge gallery of my favorite shots from the least prolific year of my career. 

 

 

 

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