Why I love people.

People are my subject. It's a broad subject because as we know all people can be so different. Each new person is a riddle and it takes time to really know someone. But once you've spent as much time shooting as many people as I have, you can't help but recognize shared human traits rather than those making us seem so different. In my work, there is a mini journey that happens which has me love photographing people. It can happen effortlessly or sometimes uncomfortably, but the good of it happens every time and without fail.

This journey begins only a few moment after we've greeted and shaken hands. This is when all preconceptions about who each other are, are unconsciously made. It can be a guarded moment for sure and maybe the most guarded of the entire shoot because we've only collected enough information to satisfy our human defense mechanisms. This preconception we make is prehistoric and only gives us a guide for how to deal with that person based on past experience. But from that point on there's an opportunity for constant renewal of our expectations. As the shoot moves on we progress and reveal to each other. By talking, laughing and telling stories; acting so simply as being ourselves, we can surprise each other and begin to alter the preconceptions we made so quickly when we weren't even aware it had happened. Sure there's plenty of posturing in there too (it's photography, not psychotherapy) but even that shares something authentic about each other. By the end of the shoot, a small bond exists. Looking back at when we first greeted seems like months ago because we both have a shared something of an experience. Shared experience is exactly what bonds us to our friends. This is why I love photographing people because it so regularly challenges my preconceptions of people and offers me a shared and experience and bond with strangers. It enlarges my life and give me confidence that I know a tiny bit more about people as a whole, and who I am myself.

The portraits below are from a recent assignment for The Chicago Reader's People Issue.
Each shoot took about 3 hours and had me experimenting with stories I could tell about each person one frame. By the end, each shoot got very loose resulting in experimentation and sometimes the best pictures. I'm really honored to have met all these exceptional and generous people.


Name: Dr. Titus Chiu
Age: 35
Profession: Chiropractic neurologist. Website
Profundity: "I have to say, love is the most powerful medicine there is."
Location: Undisclosed indoor skate park







Name: Phoenix Askani
Age: 23
Occupation: Adult film performer on Burning Angel
Profundity: "I don't think that every girl in porn is fucked-up in the head, by any means."
Location: Phoenix's apartment







Name: Jake Nickell
Age: 31
Occupation: T-shirt design entrepreneur. Threadless
Profundity: "I don't have a business degree. I think a lot of the time innovation comes from amateurs. "
Location: Threadless headquarters

In the horned forest: Chicago Magazine

Multi-instrumentalist, Andrew Bird and instrument maker, Ian Schneller have again created sonic alchemy for another foray into the Sonic Arboretum. I shot an image with the both of them for this month's Chicago Magazine. See the Chicago Magazine story here on Specimen's website


Andrew Bird and Ian Schneller

The first time they explored this beautiful and dark place was in August of 2010 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The museum asked Andrew to perform in their famous spiraled halls for its new performance series, and like any artist destined for the history books, Andrew took itas an opportunity to try something new.


Photo: Specimen Products


He and his old friend Ian of Specimen Products have been experimenting with playing Andrews violins, guitars through his beautiful, handmade tube amps and horns. They quickly built and carefully shipped some 50 horns of various sizes to the museum and devised how each would transport Andrews music to a packed house.

Behind the scenes images by Esther Kang.


Andrew is playing again on the Sonic Arboretum on December 22 at the MCA Chicago with an ever larger array of multi colored horns. I am lucky to be able to attend and will post some images here after the show.



Watch the video of the Sonic Arboretum performance

ANDREW BIRD AND IAN SCHNELLER AT THE GUGGENHEIM from Victor Quinaz & Co. on Vimeo.

Photo editor: Megan Lovejoy

Set design: Angela Finney

Retouching: Tim Blokel

Bio-fuel tech for Fast Company Magazine

When I bought my current car in 1999, I told the dealer that I'd drive it until someday I could reason to buy an alternative fuel car which could carry all my photo shit. That day hasn't come but it seems as though alternative fuel may instead be coming to my car.


Jim Rekoske of Honeywell's specialty bio fuel unit, UOP.

Fast Company Magazine recently assigned me to photograph a chemist for a feature on the growing field of bio fuel technology. Ethanol from corn is currently America's most common bio-fuel. It's used as an additive to gasoline to stem the use of oil. Corn is arguably a poor source of fuel so other sources are being explored.

I shoot Jim Rekoske at Honeywell who's perfecting making gasoline and jet fuels out of camelina, a non food crop grown in rotation with wheat. I visited Jim at his lab in Des Plaines, IL and he happily let me poke around his labyrinth of insulated pipes, gauges and cylinders. His lab was essentially a very scaled down version of what hopes to become large scale fuel production plant.


Jim Rekoske exchanging glances with HAL's younger cousin.

Photographing scientists and artists have been some of my most loved editorial assignments. There's a shared mind by both people. I can relate to how each looks at the world as an unfinished story with possibility for the future. To be either, I believe you need to have faith in new ways of looking at something old. (another post about a scientist.)

photo editor: Marian Barragan
retouching: Tim Blokel

Dark Matter Man

Discover Magazine photo editor, Randi Slatken recently asked me to shoot a leading expert in theoretical physics, Dr. Joseph Lykken. When not appearing on Nova, you can find Joe lurking around the proton- antiproton collider, better known as the Fermilab Tevatron. It's a device out of science fiction in which subatomic particles are smashed together in order to find God or "dark matter", whichever you prefer.

Theoretical Physicist, Dr. Joseph Lykken

Spread in Jan. 2012 issue of Discover (modified layout)

On an overcast fall day we drove an hour through flat cornfields, through prairie grasses and slender trees west of Chicago to the Fermilab campus. We arrived and saw nothing spectacular, except a cold war era building resembling praying hands and rising 16 stories from the red grass. There was in fact lots more to see but it was all happening underground.


Fermilabs main building, Wilson Hall designed by Enrico Fermi

The Fermilab particle accelerator built in 1967 had up until that very week, been happily smashing subatomic particles together in a massive 4 mile underground tube in search of the Higgs Boson and the reason for our puny existence. Now the larger and newer Hadron Collider is doing that work in central Europe.

I had unprecedented media access to the Tevatron because the accelerator was in the process of being shut down. Because of this coup in timing I was able to photograph for the first time, the detector; the exact point where the particles collide and are analyzed.

The Tevatron's collision detector.

What I enjoyed most about hanging out with Joe Lykken was getting closer to understanding the narrow gap between hard science and theology, and how we grapple with the misunderstandings of our very existence. Fermilab is in essence a cathedral to physics.

One of the most thrilling places I had access to was what i called, the "neutrino machine". It's a very loud, Lost in Space robot housed in a metal room used to generate the very subatomic particles that would eventually get smashed together in the Tevatron. A new and improved one is being built today and is not surprisingly the size of a Prius. They now shoot these subatomic particles or neutrinos underground to Minnesota and study how they change along the way.


Where the subatomic particles are made.

Despite the closure of the Tevetron, so much science is still happening at Fermilab on the frontiers of energy, cosmology and technology. If you're into science, they're always hiring.

Long nights up at the Pole.

This week's Time Out Chicago cover deserves a little coal for being bad. Not bad really, but naughty. Time Out Chicago's photo editor, Nicole Radja asked me to create an image where Ms. Claus gets an "upgrade" to her Holiday. Immediately this image of a shirtless St. Nick being admired by a more experienced Vixen came to mind.



Shooting got a little awkward for the talent when I asked Ms. Claus to put her right hand down the front of Santa's trousers. She game-fully agreed but couldn't keep a straight face. Who could blame her?

The issue was recently previewed here on Chicago's ABC channel 7.

Get some this holiday.

Box of bodies

Here's some behind the scenes of an image I shot for my friends at Collaboraction Theater for their upcoming production of, Dark Play. The story is about a phenomenon all who have dated on the internet has experienced. I call it "ideal projection". It happens when the person you've just met on the internet but know scant about seems to possess all the ideal qualities you've ever been looking for in a mate. In actually meeting them however, you find that your imagination has sorely let you down.


In Dark Play the story is fortunately more disturbing than what most of us have ever encountered on the web. In conclusion, things are not what they've seemed and let's just say the end comes with a visceral twist.



Our set was conceived and built by Collaboraction art director, Sam Poretta in my studio. We needed to shoot down on a box of writhing white bodies lit from below. Luckily I'd just received an iPad 2 and it came just in time for shooting this scene where the camera necessarily has to hover on a boom 12 feet in the air. I directed, shot and reviewed the whole thing from the iPad connected to a computer running capture software. Can photography ever get more slick?