In September 2001 I got my first digital camera, in fact, aside from test shots, the first thing I ever photographed digitally was the Pentagon on fire on 9/11. In January 2002 I started attending Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA to get my BFA in photography and filmmaking. VCU had a fantastic fine art program, but the problem was I am not a fine artist. I mostly just photographed bands at that point and my favorite photographers were documentarians not “Artists’ with a capital A. I saw digital photography as the future and I didn’t have the patience for the darkroom or the goofy ass conversations I had to have every day about the meaning behind some blurry black and white photo taken in a graveyard or whatever.
When I dropped out of Penn State a year earlier, one of the classes I dropped was the “Zone System” a class where I had to literally paint grey squares and then photograph them and then measure them with a fucking densitometer to calibrate my camera’s ability to to read zones of light and it was the most boring, soul crushing class I have ever taken. Luckily when I had to take it at VCU, it was taught by a man named Tommy Daniel. Tommy Daniels was a badass motherfucker who got his career started as a war photographer and learned to print from Ansel Adams. He made me actually understand the zone system, taught me to print at an extremely high level and really got me interested in portrait work in a way I wasn’t before.
As good as I was of a printer I still hated the darkroom and did every assignment I could digitally. I honestly regret it now because my digital work pre 2009 looks like absolute garbage, but at least I could see where we were headed. In 2002 I got to meet my favorite band photographer, Glen Friedman, who became a bit of a mentor to me and he recommended I get a 20mm lens to shoot bands. I bought the lens and then fell in love with shooting portraits with it. It wasn’t quite a fisheye but it distorted faces just enough to make them feel a little off.
In late 2004 I began work on my senior show that I would debut in May of 2005. I had to shoot film for it, but I decided color film was the way to go after taking a single color film class. We were lucky enough to have a color darkroom at VCU and I loved printing color film because all the work was done by a machine after you exposed the paper. No standing around timing developer and fixer, just into the machine and wait a couple minutes and you had your print. I got really good at it, which is lucky because my senior show was terribly conceived.
I had fuck all to say as an artist and to be honest not much as changed since then, but I just wanted to take over the top colorful photos of my friends. I hated studio photography so I would just find colorful backgrounds and shoot them outside. Richmond has tons of graffiti and tons of alleys and that was all the thought I put into it. I would take over the top photos of people in alleys. I wrote some bullshit about how I wanted to find the superheroes in people based on my early love of comic books or something. I am pretty sure I just made that up, but I guess it’s entirely possible that I actually believed it. I called the series something very creative, Richmond Alleys.
It quickly became apparent to my advisor that my project was going nowhere and he gave me a pretty bad grade for the first semester of the project. He wanted me to start over, but instead I just doubled down. I would do five photoshoots a day and just grind in the darkroom. The photos started coming together in small groupings. My teacher still didn’t like them, but he couldn’t deny I was putting in the work and the prints were beautiful. I wanted to go with quality over quantity and it was going to cost a fortune to frame all my photos so I found some industrial sign maker who glued my images to thick acrylic sheets and they hung on the walls without frames, just these half inch thick acrylic prints.
The show was fine, I didn’t sell anything but at least a bunch of people came. I maybe got a B in the class and honestly I am not particularly proud of the work, but it did really impact my photography going forward. Grinding those shoots like that gave me the birth of my style as a photographer. Doing these quick shoots, in uncontrolled environments with people who weren’t models and coming out with a couple decent shots no matter what became a signature of mine. It also made me fall in love with color film (man I miss Portra VC) and is the reason that I still shoot film to this day.
Over Christmas I was helping my parents clear out their storage locker and I came across hundreds of 4″x6″ prints from the 50+ shoots I did for the project. There were so many photos I really did love, ones that, looking back, were way better than the photos I picked for the project. I didn’t want to keep all these prints but I didn’t have the heart to throw them all away, so I came up with an idea. I would create stacks of 50 prints and sell them to collectors of mine. I figured people might get a kick out of this nascent work, and a look at my process back then. I didn’t want to include any terrible photos, so I started making stacks of “acceptable” images, by subject and spread them out all over my office. I would pull two photos from each pile and do that 25 times to get a stack of 50. I did it over and over again and I was around 19 collections in before I ran out of images. Luckily I had pulled some of my favorites already so I shoved those into one of the boxes and made it #1/20 and I am keeping that one for myself.
I had these stacks and started looking for ways to package them. Originally I was thinking just envelopes like you might get from a photo lab, but I found these clamshell boxes that were designed to archivally store photos so that seemed perfect. I wrote an intro to the project and had that printed on glossy photo paper that I had printed at a photo lab. I signed and numbered each one of those and packaged them with the photos in the box. For the final touch I found the original postcard from my senior show and I remade it as a sticker. I found a place that would print just 25 stickers for me and I carefully stuck them to the cases and made an object I really love. Every single one is unique and they all offer a look into some of my earliest portrait work, almost exactly 20 years later.
You can purchase your copy of Richmond Outtakes from my all new shop! I made the switch to Big Cartel from Etsy and there is a small chance something goes wrong but hopefully things will go smoothly. Richmond Outtakes is $50 which is only $1 per print which is a goddamn steal, especially for a limited run where every photo is unique. Get your copy now before they sell out!
Ps. If I photographed you for this project 20 years ago, reach out and I will send you a $10 off coupon and make sure I send you one with your photos in it…
