CIAO BELLA-dolceMODA fashion show @ MOCAD

I'm finally catching up with my life after the little Detroit adventure for the CIAO BELLA-dolceMODA fashion show @MOCAD. I drove up on Thursday, pretty much stayed up all night and drove back early the next morning. It was an incredible time.

My amazing friend and fab hairstylist Jessica James invited me up to photograph the event and we had a blast. It's been about 12 years since I've been to downtown Detroit, and I have to say I was impressed. It's such a great American city... an international city really on the border with Canada, and I was always sad to see it struggling with crime and hopelessness. But they are trying. And despite some corruption in local government, the people are really making a difference.


Downtown is beginning to look like a great artist community. The loft spaces are filling up with artists and MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) is in a giant space that probably had been abandoned for years before they moved in.

The CIAO BELLA-dolceMODA fashion show was a full on velvet rope event. Beautiful people, celebrating art and fashion on a beautiful night. I always love it when those events spill outside of the space as people cluster around the building with their drinks and smokes.

Jessica had me come backstage to photograph the hair and makeup mayhem beforehand and all the models were really great and friendly. Of course I ran out of business cards (I really have to remember to bring more of those to events like that) so we just kept entering my information in everyone's phones. Probably better than business cards anyway!

Jessica introduced me to another great photographer called Rush Zimmerman. Remember the name, she's just getting started and she's amazing already. I let her borrow my camera for a little while during the event and she came back with some incredible images.

I grabbed a spot right up front in front of the runway. I decided to shoot the whole runway show from my knees (painful, but nice angles). But of course some of the other photographers there, probably amateurs, weren't quite up on fellow photographer etiquette, and at one point I had to tell a woman to put her camera strap over her head so it wasn't dangling down in front of my lens!

Photogs were leaning over the runway to the point that some of the models were nearly bumping into them as they walked. Fairly selfish to the others like me who bothered to stake their spot early on, but I still managed to get some good images.

After the runway show I got to hang out with the organizers, models and makeup and hair artists and we had a great time having champagne and unwinding. Then Jessica, Rush, her sister Hillary and I took off for a downtown bar called Delux Lounge (where you can still smoke!!) and had a few more cocktails and did our best Mick Jagger impersonations for each other. Hilarious!

Jessica and I headed back to my hotel and I got maybe an hour of sleep before I had to be on the road again back to Chicago. What a great night.


You can see more images from the event at this link to my dolceMODA fashion show portfolio here.
And here's a link to some video from the event. Imagine me crouched down on my knees in front of the runway and you'll get an idea of the mayhem!
CIAO BELLA - MOCAD - July 10th Detroiter Video

Ciao Bella dolceMODA

A quick one tonight. I'm off to the Motor City tomorrow to shoot the CIAO BELLA-dolceMODA fashion show at MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). A fabulous stylist friend of mine called Jessica is doing all the hair for the show and in the midst of one of my busiest summers I can remember, I managed to carve out 24 hours to head up there.

The show is called CIAO BELLA-dolceMODA fashion show @ MOCAD and should be a great time. Lots of great Italian designers, music and other fabulousness. Jessica and I have been looking for a way to get together and spend some quality time, so we thought this might be the best way.

Yeah, even with the economy hitting the skids, I feel really fortunate to be this busy. But it's really been cutting into my sleep. Getting two hours of shut eye is what I call a good night the last couple of weeks. And even with throwing sleep out the window, I'm still having a hard time keeping up.

I'm so overtired that twice this week I've managed to leave the studio without zipping up my backpack. Today as I was jumping into a taxi, I was sliding my backpack off my shoulders when I heard something hit the street behind me. I turned around to see my MacBook skidding across Washington Blvd. Amazingly, it was fine. Not a scratch. Luckily my cameras were in a compartment I had zipped up.

So on that note, Jessica just sent me my hotel information and I'm going to sign off and hopefully get reasonable number of hours of sleep tonight, because I have a feeling there will be no sleeping after the fashion show tomorrow before I return back to Chicago Friday morning.

Bonne nuit!

Musings

Every time I call a phone and get voice mail these days, I find myself suspicious of how long it takes to get to the beep. How long have we had voice mail? Or even answering machines? Does anyone not know how to leave a message? So why the long list of instructions?

One theory of mine involves minutes. Mobile phone minutes. Since all wireless phone companies round up, if they can get you to stay on the line for just over a minute, they can charge you for two. In other words, if the voice mail message is simply, "leave a message after the beep," you can say, "Hey Jo, it's Billy, give me a call back." Under a minute easy.

However, if after, "Hi it's Jo, leave a message after the beep," that your friend recorded, in addition you get, "to leave a message, press one now, or wait for the tone. To leave a call back number, press two now. (Pause) At the tone, please record your voice message. When you are finished, hang up or press one for more options," you have easily spilled past the one minute mark regardless if your message is simply, "It's Billy. Call me back."

How many of us bother to press one now at the first prompt? No, we wait until the entire pitch is finished. And we use two minutes to say five words. If you're a phone company you've just doubled your money without lifting a finger. Ka-ching.

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I saw the Kooza edition of Cirque du Soleil last night. I took my friend Ali who had never seen Cirque before. It was fun. She actually didn't know where we were going. It was a surprise. We were at a lovely dinner at Carnivale beforehand when a friend of mine and her daughter passed by our table to say hello. She told me they were going to see Tom Petty at the United Center. So after dinner when Ali and I jumped in a taxi and I said, "The United Center," she looked at me with a somewhat puzzled, "We're going to... Tom Petty?" she haltingly said.

When I said no, she put it together. Cirque du Soleil had set up their tents in the parking lot of the United Center. "No way!" she exclaimed. Very funny. Quite a people watching coup with the Cirque crowd heading to the same place as the Petty crowd.

It was, as always an amazing performance. Cirque du Soleil really know how to put on an incredible show in that big top of theirs. Beautiful sets, insanely talented artists and great music all combine to take you to another world. I'm still shaking my head at what we saw.

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For the past year I've been listening to the debate on immigration ratcheted up to a hysterical pitch. The loudest protests seem to come from lower populated areas where fear of immigrants is probably stronger than actual experience with them. Talk of disease and crime. Sounds to me a lot like arguments against Europeans immigrating to the US a hundred years ago. English, Polish, Irish, Italian... we're all immigrants.

I went back even further and did a Google search on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. See if any of this sounds familiar. Just substitute Mexican for Chinese and you'll see how foolish the current arguments are for building a 700 mile, $49 billion wall along the 2 thousand miles of Mexican border.

Beginning with the most menial avocations they gradually invaded our industry they gradually invaded one industry after another until they not merely took the places of our girls as domestics and cooks, the laundry of our poorer white women, but the places of the men and boys, as boot and shoemakers, cigarmakers, bagmakers, miners, farm laborers, brickmakers, tailors, slippermakers, etc.

In the ladies' furnishing line they have absolute control, displacing hundreds of our girls, who would otherwise find profitable employment. Whatever business or trade they enter is doomed for the white laborer, as competition is surely impossible. Not that the Chinese would not rather work for high wages than low, but in order to gain control he will work so cheaply as to bar all efforts of his competitor. But not only has the workingman gained this bitter experience, but the manufacturers and merchants have equally been the sufferers.

The Chinese laborer will work cheaper for a Chinese employer than he will for a white man, as has been invariably proven, and, as a rule, he boards with his Chinese employer. The Chinese merchant or manufacturer will undersell his white confrere, and if uninterrupted will finally gain possession of the entire field. Such is the history of the race wherever they have come in contact with other peoples. None can understand their silent and irresistible flow, and their millions already populate and command labor and the trade of the islands and nations of the Pacific. . . .

Raise your hand if you think Chinese immigrants destroyed America. Yeah, I didn't think so.

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$5.00 for a gallon of gas by August? It could happen. Admittedly, since I use my feet and my bicycle to get to where I'm going most of the time, it doesn't affect me much, but that's why I live where I live. It was a choice.

So I experienced a bit of schadenfreude after reading how the big three US automakers in Detroit are losing money because they can't move their giant SUVs off their lots. Did we learn nothing from the gas crisis of the 70s? Even at $5.00 a gallon of gas, Americans pay a lot less than our European counterparts who learned long ago that smaller cars are smarter.

So here we go again. Big American cars aren't selling as there becomes a waiting list for more fuel efficient Japanese cars. Hello 1975.

I know the arguments. Smaller cars are more dangerous when they get hit by big SUVs. Well, not if we're all driving smaller cars. It's time to stop driving selfish.

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And since you've read this far, a bit of eye candy for your effort. This is from a recent shoot with a new model called Karolina.

Griffin & Sabine

I'm having the most wonderful Griffin & Sabine experience these days. I tend to keep these blogs fairly vague and general in nature, saving the really personal writing for my book (still coming along nicely, thank you!). But almost a month ago, I began corresponding with a very engaging woman over eight thousand miles away.

We've never spoken or met. It began with a kind comment about my photography, and has since evolved into a very compelling series of emails back and forth. Epic writings. Mysterious. Captivating.

One of the most attractive things to me about a woman, any woman, is her intelligence. And when someone provokes me with her writing the way she has, I find myself writing her back in a way that challenges me to be at my best. To do any less would dishonor her, in my opinion.

I'm fairly easy to get to know at a distance. Five years of blogs, my photography and the various online social networks paint a fairly accurate picture of the kind of person I am. And I've been getting what I guess you would call fan mail for more than 15 years, since the time I first began my photography presence on the web.

But this is different.

I've been enjoying the old fashioned art of communicating through writing alone. It gives, as she says, the "opportunity to express greater depth of thought somehow." It's true. It takes slightly longer to craft a sentence than to speak the same thought. And perhaps that's what I've been relishing about this correspondence. It is slow. But it raises the level of discourse to a rare place.

I'm not going to get into any further details here, only that I was telling another artist friend of mine about my communiques, and he brought up Griffin and Sabine. I had been thinking the same thing, but was wondering if I had been imagining the similarities. It's been years since I've read the G&S trilogy, but my current experience feels surprisingly familiar. In the best possible way.

Life is so....

I'm in a funny mood tonight. Not funny haha, but funny bemused. I'm smiling a lot these days, even though there are plenty of reasons out there not to. But I just feel so damned lucky anyway.

I spent the day photographing a beautiful new model, and then heading out to Taste of Randolph with one of my great friends and two of her friends. We were quite the international bunch, trading stories of chance encounters and world adventures.

You know it's going to be a good story when someone begins with, "This one time, when I was in Bolivia..."

But back to this smile. I can't quite define what I'm feeling, only that I feel like I really do have the world by the tail. Life is pleasant, challenging and exciting.

I really don't know where my life journey is going to lead me. It seems like the horizon is a bit fuzzy right now, but it's certainly not boring. I'm enjoying the ride.

The photo above is one I took during a lightning storm in Paris a couple of years ago. You never know what you're going to find on the horizon unless you bother to look closely.

Paris Gallery Fun

The Paris Foncé (Dark Paris) show was really great on Saturday. Had a lot of fun and so many wonderful people attended. I love when my loft gallery is full of people, laughing, talking, looking at the art, heading up to the roof for more fun.

Somehow the day of these events always leaves me with never quite enough time to get everything ready and as usual I was jumping into the shower 15 minutes before it was set to begin. Luckily no one showed up too early. Half the time it seems I'm answering the door in a robe at these things. This time, thankfully, not the case.

The Paris photographs looked great all up together for the first time. Robert brought over the usual delicious quantity of wine, the weather was beautiful, and I spent the evening talking to as many people as I could, always feeling like I couldn't spend enough quality time with everyone.

It was a very chill night considering all the frantic activity that was going on right up until the last minute. But by 1am, I was pretty tired. The last few of us just sat around and enjoyed the summer breeze coming in through the windows, talking and laughing.

One unusually perfect sideshow of the evening was that the Naked Bike Ride happened to go past on Washington Blvd a few hours into the party, so we turned off all the lights, stood in the windows and watched the several hundred strong body painted and exposed skin of humanity ride past.

Sort of perfect seeing that usually I have my naked photography on exhibit, but since this was a Paris only show, the riders filled in. Very nice of them.

Tour Buses and Other Thoughts

Here's a new development for the neighborhood. A tour bus stops right outside my window every hour. It's one of those English double decker buses. So if I happen to be walking around in my robe... or worse... and wave, the tourists get a little more than they bargained for. Kinda funny.

I saw a father with three young boys ages about 5 to 10 years old on Michigan Avenue the other day. The youngest suddenly pointed up to the sky and excitedly exclaimed, "It's the Eiffle Tower!", as he pointed toward the John Hancock building. One of the most adorable things I've ever seen in my life.

Obama is getting ready to address a crowd at the Corn Palace in South Dakota. Yep. A palace made of corn. I don't even have words to describe how silly this country is sometimes.

Speaking of corn. Now that we're putting it in our cars and helping to starve the world, at what point do we realize we don't need battleship sized vehicles to drive to work? I offered to fill up a friend's SUV (one of the slightly more fuel efficient ones) on a Memorial Day weekend trip, just to see how it felt. $73 later, I couldn't imagine the trade-off for more space to haul things/people with paying that much for fuel. I mean cars have trunks. How much stuff do you need to take with you? Someday we'll realize that the Europeans who have been driving tiny but fun cars for years have been right all along.

Still no cure for cancer and AIDS, but it's really great to see so many options on TV every minute to solve the rampant problem of America's lack of boners. Again, I have no words to properly explain my thoughts of the latest commercials for Cialis and Viagra. A bunch of guys in a shack singing about their Johnsons? Really? Pairs of bathtubs signifying... what?... prune sex? Everyone has the right to put whatever drugs they want into their body, but the frequency of impotence spots is mind numbing.

I discovered today that the only place within 40 miles to get the special archival ink for my specific photo printer on a Sunday is in Oak Brook. I've been burning through it a lot faster than I thought printing nice big images for the Paris Foncé Exhibit in a couple of weeks. They are quite lovely, if I do say so myself.

I got a lovely bit of fan email from a beautiful woman called Jo from South Africa yesterday. It really made my morning. I love being international.

Summer has finally arrived in Chicago. Stuck in traffic were you?

The new issue of French Playboy sports a fine example of why I think art sensibilities in Europe are far more interesting than here in America. American Playboy is an institution, certainly, but while the photography is technically perfect, it's just boring to me. The photographs of Anouck in their French cousin's pages are so much more original and compelling. Someday I'm going to take my book down the street to Playboy's headquarters here and tell them they should let me breathe some fresh ideas into their pages.

Ahhhh.... the sweet feeling of rant afterglow. Now I have to get back to printing.