2003 was certainly an eventful year photographically. It started out at a party filled with fashion designers, models and punk rock musicians and kind of went strange from there. Had I not left my camera at a party one day, it would have been the year I didn't shoot a frame of film, but I shot five rolls of tri-x at Karen O'Leary's wedding. Apart from that, I was entirely digital. I started doing a lot more paid photo shoots, a lot of setup things, and, suddenly, a lot of album covers.
It was the year of the album cover. I had three right in a row and promises of many others. I also think I got pretty good at taking portraits. I learned a lot of tricks for photographing people with whatever was at hand. I think I got fairly good at it.
In many ways, this was the year of the un-premeditated posed shot. My posing of people and creation of scenes got better, but a lot less elaborate and significantly more improvisational. It just got bizarrely easy to take a portrait that would turn people's heads. I guess this is a good skill in a commercial photographer. And that's certainly what happened in 2003, it was the year I went commercial. I found myself shooting a lot of fashion, which had always been a goal of mine. Fashion photographers always just seemed a lot more hip than news reporters. It was a year of trickery. I learned, or perfected, a few techniques that make it easy to make things look interesting. They're things I could have picked up years ago if I'd just paid more attention looking at other photographers portfolios. I started tearing all sorts of pictures of of magazines, not just people, but landscapes, and architecture, and food. All of these came together. It was a star studded year too, I photographed the usual spate of politicians, news people and celebrities, President Clinton, Bob Barr, John Podesta, Wolf Blitzer, Daniel Schorr, Howard Dean, sculptor Maria Nevelson, and writer Cindy Ovenrack. I also photographed a lot of bands, like Brainclaw, Bow Ever Down, Julia Othmer, and Carfax Abbey. It was also the year I joined a band and had people taking pictures of me for the first time. It was a strange experience. Of course all this kind of came together when I figured out how to levitate people. I got obsessive about it and for the first time in a while, I had an interesting project to work on.
2003 was notable, I think, in that my images got colder and lost any attempts at social redemption. I stopped trying to change the world possibly because it was too much work. kyle cassidy
january 5, 2004 |
