Before 2013 I had never learned how to use a camera. I took a class in high school, but the teacher was the football coach who held a grudge against me for joining the cross country team. I therefore took the slight from him and held it against photography in general. I also didn’t like that photography involved numbers. I felt like it was for dorks. You can’t feel numbers, I surely thought.
When I moved to LA in 2009 it was with the sole purpose of making films. I made a few short films, and that led to commercials, and then commercials led me to have, for the first time in my adult life, a little extra money. I wanted to put that money immediately back into my art, but I didn’t have enough for more short films. But, by this point in my LA life most of my friend were photographers. I didn’t feel as though they were dorks. Instead, they were the most inspiring artists I knew. And I thought, I’d love to be part of this.
In 2013, I made the majority of my pictures were made in true collaboration with my friend Amanda. We collaborated on photos almost that entire year. It was thrilling to have an idea at dinner one night and by the next night have it be a fully realized, beautiful picture. I was absolutely stunned and intoxicated by this creative process. Short films were cumbersome and expensive. Photos were, in contrast, the easiest thing in the world.
With all that said, I wanted to do an ongoing series of sharing my work from the beginning. My favorite photos of each year as a way to try to grasp where I’m at now, where I’ve been, what themes keep coming up, and to try to gain a better understanding of what exactly I’ve been doing all this time.
So, to start, I present the year 2013:
Greetings from Utopia — in collaboration with Amanda
Georgia and Marianne’s Blue Period - collaboration with Amanda
Reform School — Collaboration with Amanda
Rosies — Set design and creative direction by Adi Goodrich
Adi Goodrich is another major early collaborator for me. The other day I heard someone talking about how going to art school was important for them because it taught them the value of having their work critiqued and processing that criticism. I never went to art school, but I was friends with Adi during very formidable years and she was so key in helping me develop my taste and skill. She let me know every time something was good or bad, and I trusted her.
LA Still Life
Literally the first photo shoot I did all on my own. I was nervous, so I chose the blue backdrop because it’s my favorite color and I thought it would keep me calm.
Swim Team
The painting in the background is by one of my best friends and roomate at the time Forrest Perrine.
LAtopia
I was contemplating moving to NYC at this point and wanted to do a series showing what I love about LA — all the color and motion. In the end, I stayed in LA and continued to love and pursue those exact things since.
Looking back on these images, I see so much naivety and life. I was just excited to be creating. I had no idea what I was doing. I still felt like the math part of photography was for dorks. I didn’t know what f-stops or aperture were. I was literally just twisting the knobs until the image looked right on the back of the screen. To some extent, I still do it that way.
I remember that I had almost no interest in showing faces back then. I loved the mystery that created. It was a way to infuse some kind of story into an otherwise very simple photograph.
During 2013 I was getting asked to pitch on countless music videos. I think I pitched maybe 20 music videos that year. Each one bespoke to the song. Each one a full wind up and swing. Not a single artist said yes, which stung. But, what it gave me was a huge surplus of ideas that would lead to the photos in the following years.
What’s wild is that I literally started taking photos in January 2013 (Greetings from Utopia), and by June I had a photo agent and was getting put up for real-deal jobs. Everything was happening fast. I thought, I don’t like being broke much. So, I leaned in and all of a sudden I was a professional photographer.
Until next time! See you in 2014!
So excited to follow this with you, Jimmy. XO