This notion that everything should always be okay and you should always feel fine and
content in your life and if you don't then you have some mental problem or there's something
wrong with you. I think life sucks a lot of the time and a lot of the time it's great.
It's always going to be that way. It's never going to be just one sided.
I knew that I was probably going to end up in something creative because it's one of
the only fields where you don't really have to have a formal education so I totally fit
into that. But when I walked into the William Megelson exhibition at the Getty I just knew
right then. I can't really explain why I guess it's the same feeling that you get when you
know you're in love with someone. I just knew when I saw the first image in the room.
For the first seven years I was being turned down by galleries and anyone actually involved
in the official art world so that I wanted to exhibit my photos anyway because I thought
they were great. So I would just rent out little spaces for one night only or friends
lofts or just whoever I knew that had nice faces. There was a show that I had in a motel
in a really crappy part of LA and we basically just rented out all, I think there was like
eight motel rooms for three hours. The guy wouldn't rent them for longer than that because
he had his regular customers which were hourly. He knows why things happen the way they do
but I'm sure that growing up in LA with all my actor friends and movie industry all around
me I'm sure that influenced me in some way but my photography started off very much based
in street photography. I totally respect and admire the genre of street photography but
I felt like I couldn't accomplish what I felt like I was trying to accomplish or communicate.
I couldn't do it in that world. So I found myself moving towards staged images which
were inspired by street photography and that's still how I look at my work. That juxtaposition
of you know the place where all your dreams might be fulfilled or you might lose yourself
entirely to this wicked city of sin and parties and celebrity and glamour and glitz and all
that bullshit. I mean that's really such a small part of this city but it gets the most
press so everyone kind of thinks of LA like that and that's why a lot of people come here.
I've seen a lot of people lose themselves here. It's like never never land. My pictures
are so much based on post production now. I'll plan everything as much as I can before
a shoot I'll even sketch it out and go and take pictures with my iPhone like with a
wig on top of a dress in front of a car that I find on the internet and like I'll put sketches
together that way too. Sometimes those photos that I get the most excited about actually
didn't work at all and there's something else that I didn't even notice that was working
on set and I maybe took two frames of it and that's what I end up melding into the photo
with post production. I'll add you know like another person or take out a car and add a
building and a cloud and then there's the finished photo. The colors and the textures
from the 40s 50s 60s 70s 80s it's all I think all of it was more interesting. I mean the
colors of cars were like candy and now all of our cars are gray black and beige. It's
not photography. I feel like they should come up with another word for what the young generation
of photographers are doing now because it's not the same at all. Someone told me that
Alfred Hitchcock felt like his movies were finished when the storyboards were done being
drawn up because he was going to shoot exactly what was in every frame of each storyboard.
That's despair which was my first film. I approached it as a still photograph that just moved a
little bit to the left and a little bit to the right and that's what I thought I was
making. I didn't even think about it as a film or movie or anything like that. It wasn't
until actually the New York Times films that I suddenly had this small epiphany about film
and I realized that I was making short films. I've pretty much been training myself for
the past years to learn to be a director without even realizing it because that's just the
way I naturally went about photography as a director. I think that's why it's so exciting
to me because I know that I don't really know what I'm doing still after all these
years and I don't think I ever will feel like I know what I'm doing because I still
get the same knots in my stomach before every shoot that hasn't changed at all. In fact
maybe it's gotten worse because like the more I do it the more challenging I want to make
it for myself.
