Dave Raphael

I was walking down Broadway the other day when I came across these fine guys building a pothole.  We have them all over the city (potholes), but you never really get all up close and personal with the master craftsmen who ply their trade at expertly destroying the front suspension of my auto when given to bouts of reckless driving, or really, just driving in general.  I regret not introducing myself but at least the next time I get my front shocks into full compression and my shoulder muscles into full spasm I’ll have these fond images hopefully popping into my head as my eyelids clamp shut behind white knuckles on the steering wheel.

I recently bought a digital camera.  Ive never spent such an absurd amount of money on something that a) was so entirely uninspiring and b) havent at least *tried* to use.  So after two weeks of staring at the camera on my table I picked it up tonight upon completing a fourteen hour day on a Warner Brothers TV show.  Fully fried and half asleep, this is the thing that I look at every day, at least once.  Enjoy my first video frame realized by a lens computer of what ordinarily might have been a cool photo had it been shot with a four instead of an eight.  In consideration of its milestone status, I thought I would share.  Now that DC has finished his quilt, he can look at it too, perhaps everyday.

By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody…

Son of a highly recognized 5th Marine Scout Sniper, Jay rose to meet his own celebrity after a rumoured affair with Brittany Spears.  Together we learned that the cover of the National Enquirer and the cover of Rolling Stone are two very different universes.  One of my old friends made it to the cover of Rolling Stone.  We made the cover of the National Enquirer.  After all that, and careful consideration, Im not too sure which one is worse.

We went to high school together, shared many dreams, played in bands and over the years, have made several records together.  I took these two years ago maybe, during a break from grinding some idea out in the studio.  Many of our best ideas were formed on this patch of grass and wood.  Much of our best wasted time has been spent at this spot as well.  With the bustle and madness of being a grown up, sometimes it takes digging up some old picture to be reminded of who your best friends are in life.  Sometimes you are lucky enough to find those pictures.

I took these photos with an old summitar lens that was made right after WW2.  That lens probably had some incredible history.  It saw fuel go from leaded to unleaded to high octane.  Watched several giant wars come and go.  Saw Hollywood change from black and white to colour.  Watched Americans stop reading and get sucked into Television until there was nothing but apologetic sheep and egg shell walking lemmings left in this country.  Saw the birth and death of Rock and Roll, the US space program and the professional career of the great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.  It’s not a stretch to imagine that even Jay’s dad might have seen a French journalist running around the Arizona Terriroty with a lens just like this one stuck on a Leica while the jungle slowly set in to rot the camera’s leather strap.  Then some guy sold it to me.  I shot three whole rolls of film with it and then immediately dropped it onto the driveway outside the studio, effectively ending the life of such a fine fine lens.  First time I ever did anything like that.  Ive since purchased three such lenses, none of them make pictures that look like these.  Ah, sometimes the good ones have to vaporize back into the ether of imagined greatness.  Thankfully, I have some physical proof of this one’s existence.

My post the other day got me thinking about Pavlina, had to dig out some old photos.  These all date from the 1990’s and I was definitely still shooting on an SLR then, more than likely a nikon F3hp with nikkor lenses.  I remember that first shot like it was yesterday, we had some HMI’s and that was my first experience humping a magnetic ballast up a flight of stairs, fun times…

this was shot at dusk at Joshua Tree, it was still a National Monument at that point in time.  It would soon get upgraded to National Park and all the roads in the park got repaved when Clinton reorganized how funding got distributed to parks inside the department of the interior.  The difference between the roads in that park before and after National Park status was fairly significant.  Anyone remember how bad the roads were in the monument?  This was sometime in the summer, all the makeup we had with us that day melted in the car under the high desert sun.

I know people will ask about this place…  The world infamous nude bowl.  Nothing really needs to be said about this spot, but for the uniniated, people came from literally all over the world to skate that pool and you can basically write the real and complete history of Stoner Rock in America based upon what happened on the edge of that pool.  Around the time this was shot, there was a big fire here, burned at least a few hundred acres, and that really put it on the radar for local law enforcement.  Shortly after, the law filled in the pool with a front loader but people dug it out, replastered it and the party went on for a while.  Then at a party some people got shot and that was really the end of the end.  They flattened that whole hillside and that was that.  When the place got bulldozed, that was pretty much the end of Stoner Rock.  It would take months or maybe years after before someone would coin the term “stoner rock” to market all the crap that exploded as a result of the parties at this place.  Yeah, it actually was indirectly that pivotal.  Nobody noticed at the time and of course, thats what always makes shit like that so cool.  Crazy history.  Crazy crazy crazy history.  And that was that.  Im glad I still have a handful of photos that survived from that place.  This was always one of my favorites from the day I dragged a friend up there to check it out.

Pancakes in the Morning…

Barefoot in the Afternoon…

This girl always struck me as one of the most interesting looking people around, just one of those peeps you could look at for hours or days and find new stuff to focus on.  Incidentally, Pavlina was unquestionably one of the nicest people I’ll meet in this lifetime and the next one combined.  Just the raddest girl ever.  I hope where ever she is, she’s having the best time and still pauses to giggle at the little stuff.

Life sized person.

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.