Over the past I have no fucking clue how long I have been organizing every photo I have taken since I moved to NYC in 2006. The idea is to eventually have a big fucking folder of images with all the best stuff from the last 8 years and to have things organized so that I can pull images that I need. I also notice I have found a ton of stuff that didn’t stand out at the time, for example just today I found a photo of Adam Scott I took before I even knew who Adam Scott was.
Since I started this project I have done a great job of organizing my 35mm archives. I worked pretty much 10 hours a day on that for a couple weeks and got it done. The digital stuff is a lot harder to do because of the sheer volume of the images. On a slow month I might shoot 4000 photos but during an event like South By Southwest I might shoot twice that many in five days. Getting through stuff has been fun, but I can only do so much a day without going insane.
Just today I finished going through 2009 which is a pretty serious accomplishment because in early 2008 I had a shitty camera so could go through that stuff very quickly and by the end of 2010 I had started shooting a bit less nightlife. In 2009 however I was going out nearly every night and sometimes shooting two or three events a night. So despite having more than five years to go I think I am nearly halfway through my digital archives. The last couple years are pretty organized anyway…
So, in celebration of finishing 2009 I decided a Throwback Thursday post was in order. I have put up a pretty massive gallery (over 300 images!) from 2009 that includes a lot of my favorite shots from the year. It’s probably less than a third of the images I pulled, but it gives you a nice look at one of my best years photographically. It’s amazing to see how far I progressed. The early 2009 stuff is terrible while the late 2009 work is better than anything I am doing now. It’s inspired me to work harder when shooting nightlife and makes me miss how much fun I used to have.
In this gallery you will find mostly party photos although there is some random stuff thrown in including a few old school naked girls in bathroom photo shoots. There are a ton of photos from the party Playhouse at Cain that was a really great party both photographically and on a hot babes I made out with kinda level. Unfortunately they stopped paying me and still fucking owe me money. There are also a bunch of images in here of kinda celebrity stuff or blast from the past images that are noteworthy for whatever reason. They might not all be fantastic photographically but they are cool to look at.
I think the big winner of 2009 was Roxy Cottontail who through two parties that were some of the most fun times I had in ’09. Check out her birthday party that year and the Pepsi party with Diplo that she through that year. Both great events. Speaking of Diplo… I photographed him and Steve Aoki a weird amount of times in 2009. Ninjasonik comes up a lot too and I shot a couple of great shows by Monotonix and Spank Rock who both happened to play the best Siren Fest I ever went to. A lot of girls show up a bunch in 2009 Alex Magnetic, Jocelyn and Chloe are particularly muse-worthy. Since then Alex was my intern and Chloe is a super famous model so that all rules.
Honestly there is way too much in here to cover… tons from Webster Hall when Trash and Boys & Girls were both happening on the same night… a bunch of big events like SXSW, Sundance, AVN Awards… live bands… burlesque… zombie crawls… comedy… fashion… Driven By Boredom tattoos… the list goes on and on.
But lastly I will mention there are a lot of pictures of my good friend Ease DaMan who sadly died recently. I met him in 2009 and took so many photos of the guy that year. He was so fun and so photogenic, rarely had his shirt on and once I showed up to a party and the cops had shut it down because a fight broke out and Ease fucking bit someone. We all miss you tons Ease. Rest in peace.
I have no idea how I am going to come up with selects since I love so many of these photos, so I am just gonna put some random shit below here. Just make sure you look at the full gallery… and yeah, these photos are significantly NSFW.
Click here to see a bunch of photo highlights from 2009!