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. 

Over a year ago one of my favorite humans, Carter Cruise, was DJing a party in Vegas. It was not an AVN party but it was the same week as the AVNs so she was around and brought her friend Natalie. We all hung out a bunch and Natalie and I hit it off and we planned a shoot while we were all still in town and it was great. 

Since then, the world has obviously changed a ton and during the pandemic Natalie and Carter seemed to be living the best life because they have a pool and live with another hot friend and they started a clothing line together (which I will plug in a minute) and I just wish I was quarantining with them and just taking all the photos of them for the internets. 

Anyway, I planned on posting these photos a long time ago but there was that whole pandemic thing happening and Natalie decided if she had to find a new job when the world collapsed then maybe she didn’t want her nudes floating around out there, but good news is that her job is secure and presumably psyched about her nudes because she told me I could post them and I am 100% sure you guys are going to love that life decision because she is unreasonably pretty. (She also has an absolutely incredible laugh.)

Because of this delay, these photos have already been on Girls of DBB for months (she was cool with them being paywalled) but now you get to look at them for free… (at least some of them, I posted a ton of the 35mm photos on Girls of DBB too which you don’t get because I want your money).  And now that my plug is out of the way, it’s of course time to plug Carter and Natalie’s clothing line After Dark LA. I have already taken some photo of babes in them (check my Instagram) and I still have another shirt to shoot someone in soon and I will keep supporting their stuff because they are both amazing.

I can’t wait to visit Carter & Natalie soon cause I just got my first vaccine shot (thanks dangerously high blood pressure!) and as soon as this sweet Pfizer juice kicks in I am headed to LA so I can hang out in their pool and take their photo and probably some other stuff I can’t think about right now. It’s gonna be great. Honestly, just leaving Brooklyn would be a nice start, but I owe you guys some new photos.

Speaking of, next post on my website is gonna be the “Best” of 2020 post and then I only really have one nude shoot left and I am out of photos. I should probably get to fucking work huh? Soon!

Now click here to check out all of these photos of the incredible Natalie (and some bonus Carter cameos)!

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Twenty years ago today I was sitting in my dorm room at Penn State and I hit publish on the first ever Driven By Boredom blog post. It’s been a wild time doing this, and it’s honestly amazing I have continued it after all these years. The site was started as a place for me to put all the random projects I would make and email to my friends before social media and even things like photo and video storage sites existed. Blog wasn’t even a word yet. (Technically it was, but even early bloggers like myself weren’t using it at the time.)

Before I started Driven By Boredom I had made several websites, including strangely enough, a party photo website. I would ride the “drunk bus” that ran around the Penn State campus late nights and take people downtown. After midnight it was complete chaos and I would take photos of people partying on the bus and then get the photos developed and scanned and posted to the website a few days later. When I started blogging though, it felt different. There was a community of people who would all talk and exchange links and collaborate and it felt really exciting even though I wasn’t even leaving my dorm room. I have real life friends from those days and a bunch of us still talk occasionally on a Facebook group. 

That feeling I had back then I am getting again, feeling like I am at the beginning of something and talking with other people who are also excited about this brand new community. That’s why I am celebrating the 20th anniversary of Driven By Boredom with an NFT. If you know what that is, feel free to skip over the next three paragraphs. For everyone else, let me give you a quick breakdown (if you want a more in depth breakdown click here).

NFTs are digital items that are recognized on a blockchain, that way you can confirm who owns something and the provenance of that item by tracing all the sales back to the original creation. This will be used in the future in so many ways, that I won’t get into because it would take me forever, but we are going to talk about art. The reason you might have heard about NFTs before now is because some digital artwork is selling for millions of dollars. There is a Christie’s auction right now happening and people have been flipping these things for just massive amounts of money. (Two days ago I made over $1000 in two hours selling one.)  As crypto has skyrocketed these new millionaires are turning around and putting their money back into the blockchain to buy digital items that they love, think will increase in value, or are honestly just a flex. This has created insane prices that with some exceptions will all probably come crashing down in the short term, but I think in the long term we are just getting started. 

Why would you want to own what is essentially a gif? For the same reason you would want to own one of my photos instead of just printing out one of the photos I post on my site. It comes from the artist, supports that artist, and gives you an item to collect, even if it’s a digital one. While these crazy prices might not hold, it’s pretty clear digital items have value, people have been making money for years selling items in Second Life or speculating on domain names. None of this is really new, but having them secured with the blockchain is only a few years old.

As an artist, NFTs are really exciting because not only does it exist as a new revenue source, but it’s one you can track and profit off future sales. If you buy my NFT for $10 and later sell it for $20, I will get 10% of that future sale, and if that person sells it I will get 10% of that sale as well forever. Those royalties might make it possible for artists to make a living while other people are benefiting as well. As a customer you are supporting their work that you can show off in your digital art gallery and as that artist becomes more relevant you can make some money in the process and that sale helps the artist again. If you can wrap your mind around the idea of paying money for a digital item it’s very exciting. 

So let’s talk about my first NFT. In the future I am going to be doing photography NFTs. I have already started working on updating a series of photos for this new medium that I can’t wait for people to see, but this is the test run. I wanted to create a very cheap NFT that I might lose money on, but I really just wanted to go through the process and introduce my followers to the idea. My hope is that when I start doing more fine art NFTs, these cheap ones will actually become more valuable like how my first book sometimes sells for 10 times what people bought it for in 2013. 

So what am I selling? “Blingy” digital animations of my logo. Seriously.

The current DBB logo is actually the third logo I have had. It was designed by my friend Adam Squires in 2006 for a concert film I produced and has now been tattooed on a dozen different people and had cameos in tons of movies and TV shows as I used to stick that fucker on every lamp post in lower Manhattan. It’s very mildly iconic and I love it even though it kinda looks like a dick and balls. 

I decided to do it as three editions of blinged out gifs in the style of your awful friend’s MySpace page. Why, you might ask? Well it gives it that early internet feeling when every webpage had an “Under Construction” or a Mailbox gif on their page. The MySpace look is also important because I originally started putting the logo HUGE on my photos so that you could see it when people made my photo their MySpace photo. I loved seeing Top 8s filled with my logo. It was a fun time to exist as a party photographer. 

Okay, so let’s talk about the editions. Up first is the cheap one, the neon pink one is an edition of 20 to celebrate the 20th anniversary and I am selling it for .02 ETH. You will have to pay a gas fee to take possession of it, and that could actually cost more than .02 ETH by itself, but that price goes up and down the more people who are trying to process Ethereum transactions. The “special edition” is the turquoise and pink one that costs .2 ETH and is from an edition of only 5. I don’t expect these to sell right away because spending over $200 on one of my animated gifs is a big ask, but I do have some people who like to support my work and my thought is that if this catches on in the future maybe my very first drop will have value that makes that purchase make sense. There is also a gold edition of just one that costs 2 ETH that I made just for me to keep in my account because I love it. 

So finally how do you buy these things? I minted them on Rarible, but they are also available on my OpenSea page as well. You are going to need to download the crypto wallet app MetaMask and you will be able to transfer ETH into that wallet and then use that to log into Rarible or OpenSea. Once you know what are you are doing it’s really easy. If you are new to crypto you need to buy some ETH. Most people can buy it via MetaMask, but if you live in New York state or some other places, the easiest way to do it is to buy ETH via CoinBase and then transfer it to MetaMask. You will have to pay a fee to transfer it, but if you buy at least $100 in CoinBase and use my link we both get free Bitcoin out of it so that should cover the fee.

I realize this is all very complicated, but it won’t be in the future, and if you learn how to do it now, you will probably have the opportunity to get some very cool stuff before people even figure out that it’s cool. Plus you will have already started your soon to be huge collection of collectable digital art and helped me cover all the minting fees I had to spend to make these damn things in the first place. I honestly could have put a new zine out for the cost to make these things, but at least with my animated logos you can’t spill coffee on them.

Happy birthday Driven By Boredom.

Click here to buy the first ever Driven By Boredom NFT.

Many months ago when Covid numbers were super low in NYC I went up to see some friends upstate at their rental property turned quarantine home Sparrow House. I knew there were a ton of great places for photos so I hit up my friend Kirra who is probably the human I have photographed the most in my life about coming with me for a one day road trip. She was down and suggested she bring her friend Nina Burns who was in her Covid bubble and has just happens to have incredible eyeballs. It ended up being a great day trip and very productive which was ideal because I haven’t really taken any photos since the protests this summer which makes me feel like trash.

Good news is my new sedentary lifestyle combined with my horrific diet means I was able to get a vaccine appointment, bad news is I will probably die of a heart attack by the time I am 50. Whatever the case is that as soon as I get fully vaccinated I am going to LA and maybe Vegas to shoot a ton of content so I can get back into updating this website more than once every two weeks. I am still gonna be wearing masks on shoots and being as safe as possible anyway, but I am gonna be traveling and shooting more.  Anyway, sorry for the tangent, back to Nina.

So yeah, when we got to Sparrow House it was already dark so the only photos we took were Kirra and Nina in a sick claw footed bathtub which I have already posted and you should go look at immediately if you haven’t seen them. The next day we took a bunch of photos outside. I shot Kirra in the house and by the train tracks and shot them both down by the river. I also climbed up this incredibly steep hill covered in all manor of shrubbery to take these photos of Nina that I am posting today. We got covered in burrs and scratched by thorns so please enjoy these photos! 

If you want to see the photos we shot by the river, the ones of both of them are Girls of DBB exclusive photos to the bathtub pictures gallery, and the ones of Nina in the river are Girls of DBB exclusive photos to this gallery which I uploaded several days ago. The point is, sign up for Girls of DBB so you can see a bunch more photos of these babes and see all the photos in high resolution. And speaking of giving me your money, my OnlyFans has some pretty funny BTS of Nina trying to get undressed while stuck in a thornbush. Nina is a goddamn champion for that shit. Don’t let anyone tell you being a model is easy. Speaking of being a model and continuing with this promotional paragraph that now uses the phrase “speaking of ” three times, Nina and her fellow America’s Next Top Model contestant Cory have a podcast you should check out immediately. 

I realize this post is rambling, as per usual, but I just wanted to let you know that I still have Kirra’s photo from this Sparrow House trip to come and since we took these I photographed Nina again but honestly the photos aren’t that great because instead of taking photos we watched the actual insurrection that was playing out on live TV as we attempted to take photos and it got a little dark to shoot with natural light. Don’t get me wrong Nina is still real hot and we still got some nice shots, but not sure when I am gonna get around to posting them. Hopefully I will get to shoot Nina again in settings as incredible as Sparrow House instead of in a slightly too dark room as American Democracy was crumbling before us. Okay it’s photo time.

Click here to see the photos of Nina Burns in the woods at Sparrow House. 

The first time I photographed Amanda Whip it was so long ago that the original post doesn’t even seem to be on my website. The gallery is part of my old, barely functional gallery system and I think the camera I was using was my first Nikon digital camera which mean it’s gotta be before early 2009. We shot it in a nightclub bathroom but honestly I am not even sure which one. I thought in my brain that it was Darkroom but it might be Annex or Happy Ending? I am positive I could figure it out if I really wanted to but that would require effort and you guys don’t care so let’s move on. 

Amanda and I talked forever about shooting again. She never wanted to come to Brooklyn and I would see her once in a while and we would talk about it and then never actually do it. Shortly before the pandemic started I ran into her on the street in her neighborhood and we caught up for a second. I hadn’t seen her in years and once again we talked about taking photos. And then a pandemic happened.

Amanda is a burlesque and aerial performer and she does all sorts of crazy flexible things in her underwear and it is very impressive and amazing but very hard to make money at when people aren’t allowed in clubs anymore. She’s very comfortable being a hot person in real life, but hates the internet so her transition to hot person on the internet was slow at first. Fortunately she started forcing herself to use Twitter more and we started talking on there again and finally actually planned to do a shoot to promote both of our OnlyFans that we both started during the pandemic. We shot a ton of photos that you are about to see, but we also shot a bunch of video that you can see on my OnlyFans if you search for Amanda. I even put another video up today, and I think I still might have a couple clips left. You should also sign up for Amanda’s OnlyFans because she is great. 

While we are promoting things I should also mention that these photos have been up already for two day on Girls of DBB. There are even some close up photos of Amanda’s butt up there because I needed some reason to convince you to sign up right? And as always, the photos are in double the resolution because this website was designed before I even took those first photos of Amanda and we are still living in a 2008 world over here. Okay, that’s enough of that. It’s photo time. 

Click here to see a bunch of NSFW of my old friend Amanda Whip!

Ps. Speaking of friends, shout out to Coop whose artwork is behind Amanda’s bed and is in a ton of these photos. 

A year ago I did my annual trip to Vegas and LA to shoot a bunch of stuff and then do the AVN Awards week madness and I don’t get to drive living in NYC and I love being on the road so I decided I would come to Vegas for one day and rent a car there and then drive to LA for a week, come back and drop off the car and then just be in Vegas for the rest of the time. It was a perfect plan and it gave me a chance to shoot someone I had been wanting to shoot for ages, Rocky Emerson.

When I landed in Vegas I had another shoot planned but that model couldn’t end up doing it and I sort of didn’t really know what to do and spent like an hour at the airport before I could check into my hotel trying to figure out a plan. Eventually I just went and tried to check in early and when I got there it had this huge window that was perfect for shooting photos in. I hit up Rocky and she was super busy because she had just returned to town herself and was planning for her brother to visit and she was like “come by and you can take photos of me building an Ikea bed for him”. This seemed like the perfect idea for the shoot so I went over to her place but the room she was building the bed in was super dark and there was no way we were gonna be able to make that work.

There was good light in her living room but her neighbors could easily see in so that wasn’t ideal either so we decided to go back to the hotel. She decide just to put the mattress on the floor and made the bed and I actually saw her fold a fitted she which was honestly incredible and we finally took off to head back to my hotel. Unfortunately by the time we got there it was too dark anyway because it was fucking January and daylight doesn’t exist and so we had to use this horrible lamp to shoot with. This is the pain of not being a real photographer… if the light sucks I just have to deal with it because I am not fucking bringing lights anywhere with me.

Anyway Rocky is real hot so it’s fine, and we shot some really nice 35mm stuff that was less reliant on good lighting cause it was either black and white or shot with flash. And we got a few really nice shots digitally too, but I think we were both a bit disappointed with the photos which is a bummer, but again, Rocky is very hot so it’s fine but it probably explains why I haven’t posted these for a year. But I am running out of content so here we are. I hope we get to try again one of these days.

After the shoot we went out with her friends and her brother and honestly it was a blast and thinking about it now makes me really miss fun. Okay, let’s get slightly less depressing and slightly more commercial. If you want to see some extras from this set that are more R rated, make sure you check Girls of Driven By Boredom and I should plug my OnlyFans too. I put a preview of this up on there yesterday and I recently edited together a video of a bunch of old Snapchats of “porn stars doing things” which is just a way of me saying it’s a bunch of hot girls who are not actually naked and it features a two second video clip of Rocky and her friend Sam dancing like those inflatable things outside of used car dealerships. It’s not up yet but honestly I just needed some sort of reason to plug my OnlyFans so let me live.

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of the amazing Rocky Emerson.

As I slowly run out of content I bring you some “new” photos of Phoenix Askani, someone who I first photographed way back in 2010 and I have known her even longer. It’s such a crazy thing to think about. The party we went to after shooting seems like it was two years ago, not more than ten. I remember that night so well. I remember that whole trip so well.

I went out to LA for a couple of weeks in 2010 and because AirBNB didn’t exist, I went on Craigslist and found a sublet in Koreatown that had nothing left in the apartment except for a bed because the people had already moved out. I remember going on a date with a girl who I met at a really fun party and when I told her I was 30 she told me I was too old for her which was the first time that had ever happened. I went to my buddy Justin’s birthday party and now they write music for Justin Bieber and Britney Spears and shit. The Lakers won the NBA Championship and there was a mini riot outside of the hotel where Phoenix and I were shooting and after we went to that party and I hung out with Aaron Paul for the second time and he was once again unreasonably nice and so I started watching Breaking Bad for the first time on that trip. Bam Margera was also at that party and he was easily the drunkest I have ever seen any human ever, and that is saying something considering I worked in nightlife for years. I also shot EDC for no reason just because some friends were there and I figured I could get a press pass from the LA Weekly. It was the last one ever in LA because someone got trampled to death. Oh and a Smith’s convention for the LA Weekly as well. Anyway it was a good trip.

Sorry for that very long tangent but clearly I am going through a midlife crisis. Let’s get back to Phoenix. I shot her in her apartment in LA almost exactly a year ago. (We also shot a third time in 2012 in Chicago.) Her apartment was really dark but it looked out on this path that went to nowhere and there was no reason for anyone to be back there so I had this idea of standing in her room and shooting her outside. It ended up being pretty hilarious actually. She also sort of had to hide from her neighbors on the sides so I got some pretty funny shots of her hoping her neighbors didn’t see her trying to climb a wall in a bathrobe. After that we shot some stuff in her bed but it wasn’t looking great so we tried the living room which worked but her roommate came home in the middle of her just hanging out naked in the living room so she ran into the bedroom and I was just sort of standing there to greet a stranger in their own home. Honestly I don’t even know if that’s exactly what happened because it was a year ago but that sounds right to me. We ended up the shoot in the kitchen, but most of those photos were me shooting up at her while she had her legs spread because she was standing on both kitchen counters and they are a little too explicit for this site even though they are some of my favorite shots from the day. You can see those on Girls of DBB if you want.

I guess I should also plug my OnlyFans while I am here. I posted some video of this shoot, and Phoenix climbing the wall and throwing her bathrobe to me, but it was a while ago so you gotta search that shit out for yourself. 

Okay, I am done with this. Go look at some n00dz.

Click here to see a bunch of NSFW photos of my old friend Phoenix Askani! 

Ps. I pretty much forgot to shoot any photos that were safe for the main page. Whoops. 

When I first met Olive Glass I squished her head for some reason. I have no explanation for how that came to be but here we are. A couple years later I finally got to take photos of Olive and I feel like we got some good ones and you can now look at them. 

These were taken at her place in LA which is pretty much the last time I left NYC for more than a couple of days on my way to the AVN Awards last year which would be happening this month if it weren’t for the apocalypse which means I am going to miss AVN for the first time in over a decade and also that these photos are nearly a year old which is honestly far too long but what are you gonna do? The world ended, don’t blame me.

What makes me very happy about these photos is that Olive liked them. She does a lot of very fancy pretty fashion modeling and whenever I see her photos on the internets they are always retouched and glamourous and things and obviously my photos are not like that. She still appreciated my raw look which is awesome. Instead of having her pose we just hung out drinking coffee and taking photos and telling stories and all that stuff and as you probably know by now that’s my favorite kinda shoot. Can’t wait to get back out to LA one day so we can do it again.

And now it’s time to pay the rent… These photos, plus a bonus mini set shot in Olive’s kitchen, plus some bonus explicit shots are all on Girls of Driven By Boredom in high resolution. I also posted a teaser to this set on my OnlyFans. There’s also a pretty funny video of Olive and some mylar balloons that I posted to my OnlyFans a while ago. Lastly, unrelated to Olive, a photo I took of Nicolette Shea went viral on Twitter the other day so I released it as a print in order to raise some money for the Bowery Mission so if you have ever wanted to own one of my photos this seems like a pretty good time. 

Okay, done with the promotion, time to look at some pretty photos.

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of Olive Glass!

I feel like every year I do some sort of Christmas post but this is not like every year. I haven’t left my apartment today and I haven’t seen anyone and I spent an hour today zooming with my parents and brother and then another with my less immediate family. I haven’t exactly felt festive. As miserable, pessimistic and Godless as I am I actually like Christmas. I like seeing my family and my parent’s dog and eating food and I like getting stuff I would never buy myself and I like buying people stuff they would never buy for themselves and the whole thing. This year all my family’s gifts got lost in the mail and haven’t even left Brooklyn despite the fact that I mailed them 11 days ago. Merry Christmas. 

Honestly I am not sure what the point of this post is. I don’t have anything new for you and who wants to read about someone else bitching about the pandemic again? No one needs that. I did post some outtakes from my 2016 Christmas card on my OnlyFans but most of that stuff I posted on Twitter back then. Nothing new. 

I guess I got one thing but it’s just sentimental and not at all content you would come here for. My brother edited together a bunch of old home movies for the family for Christmas and I put a 20 second clip (of a 45 min video) of my brother as a cute baby and me playing with a toy gun in a cowboy outfit on my Instagram so I guess you could look at that if you wanted to and hadn’t seen it already. 

Yeah honestly I just feel some sort of compulsive need to put this post up just because I said I was going to in my last post. There is honestly no point of this and I am just gonna watch football and go to sleep now. I got nothing. I’m out. See you guys in 2021. Merry Christmas.