Dave Raphael

to the middle of this salt wasteland in August trying to figure things out.

Thoroughly distracted by thoughts of Quilting and the impending excitement of The Man there were definitely no conclusions reached that evening.

The evening before I took this photo, I ate red meat for the first time in about 15 years just after speaking on the phone with a junkie dropout who found some solace in whatever jungle Hawaii has to offer.  It’ll likely be another 15 years before I chew on more bovine deliciousness.  I hope Hawaii treats my friend right and I get to talk to her sometime again.  That night I watched a bank robber beat up one of his friends, a british soldier, only to have the whole thing broken up by his wife, a local police sergeant.  The next morning I was attacked by a bird inside their home before the robber came ’round to give me a tour of a $15M house he helped build.  We stopped at the dump on the way back to his log house to shoot assault rifles and an Italian 1911 at a washing machine and a hunk of metal that used to be a car but were turned away by a guy refueling a front loader with a gasoline nozzle in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other.  On the way back out the dirt road with a car full of guns we drove past a VW bus filled with the usual suspects awaiting the rainbow gathering that apparently was on the calendar in the very near future.  It didnt seem like such a mind bending day at the time and yes, this all really happened.

I left the Mountains that morning with a foggy head trying to put together the events of the previous 24 hours.  There are few places on earth quite as effective as this one when it comes to activities like clearing thy head, discovering the heart of stillness and driving a German machine in a straight line as hard and fast as your nerve can grip a steering wheel through the sweat lining your palms.  Palm Sweat: Nature’s unbeatable Polygraph.  This is the place where your mind can never get quiet enough, the music can never seem to blast loud enough and no matter what you do, the clutch can never find its way out from under your left foot instantly enough.  There would be no stillness that day, completely burnt from the last 2300 miles and fully fired up about the 358 miles left to go…  By the time I got out here, it was still well over 100 degrees, the ants in my pants had begun to stir and after a brief yet passionate fondle of the Super Angulon, the Circus left town, just like that.  This incidentally was the last time the side of my righteously awesome Audi would look quite like the above photo.  I massaged an orange safety cone on the highway at about 105mph and it performed a unique, but somehow pedestrian modification to my driver’s side panels…  All this and Winnemucca was still hours away…

I was going through a folder of unsorted photos tonight and came across this digi snap.  This photo was featured in a show in Switzerland in May 2007.  A snap from the show:

and the original:

This photo is an oldie but a goodie from the 90’s, and represents a bunch of firsts.  Was the first time I brought a model to Joshua Tree, was the first time I shot with a hassleblad and was the beginning of a  collaboration with Pavlina, a czech superstar I regret having lost touch with.  Also definitely the beginning of the white shirt thing…

There’s more info on the show here:

http://www.allphotographersnow.ch/

Hope the guy in the red shirt found the photo a musing moment away from the Swiss afternoon hustle and bustle.  Also hope that the lighting designer for the show figured out that the light on the left wall could really benefit from flooding it slightly and throwing a double in it…

on top of this volcano, trying to figure things out.

jury is still out on conclusions reached that afternoon.

My buddy Kevin and his lovely wife Jenny just had their first baby.  Speaking with him reminded me I had shot this series two years ago.  I was in LA mixing a movie for a friend and on a weekend off drove up to SF in total monsoon conditions.  What is usually a five or six hour drive took me eleven that day, the 5 was closed around Ft. Tejon because of snow, everyone thinks California is all sunshine and bikini’s…  After a wet night out, I met up with Kevin in the mission the next afternoon, caught a bit of a jazz band playing, went for a wet stroll and drank the night away.  Here is an excerpt from the days film.

San Francisco still has a pirate FM station.  Your city just isn’t cool until you have real pirate radio.

This dog sat watch at the top of the hill, below the park.

The Gentrified Mission.  Few years and a few dollars can change everything…

old time bro, ex bandmate, entrepreneur, and now dad.  I have some rad friends.

Union Square is always full of activity, but the park was packed at 2 AM election night when all of these were taken. From the several blocks away where I live, I heard the madness in the park and had to go check out the scene. In addition to the crowd cheering, every car on the road was honking away.

Right around two in the morning the daily post came around and was handing out the first newspapers.

Ive definitely been to outdoor festivals where the crowd was not cheering as loudly as it was this night, and never would I have imagined that a Politician in America could inspire crowd surfing. If there was some plywood hanging around, there could have been some real fun.

The high five was in full effect this evening. This last photo is probably my favorite from the night, two strangers going up high.

well, Ive been meaning to do this for months. Im still shooting film exclusively, thought Id start off with some insight into what the back of my camera and the inside of my bathroom looks like… I just put 9,800 miles on my little audi in seven weeks with somewhere between two and three hundred rolls of film to show for it… Expect updates soon.