Karen O 11/14/2019

Karen O texted me out of the blue 3 weeks ago to see if I would come photograph the Dangermouse show at King's Theatre..   which of course I say Hail Yeah !!!!   --I love photographing anything Karen is doing, and that show was beautiful.   and oh man Brian from Dangermouse is v handsome it made me shy.    Mostly took live show photos (some so crazy beautiful of Karen singing)... was hard to get my focus sometimes, the lighting changed from super dark to spotlights that made everything shine and twinkle and that's where I got the real good shots.   I'm working on the scans now, I need to send them stuff....


super busy at work and thanksgiving last week was amazing in nyc, my college-going (!!)  nieces Sage and Selma came down from Vermont and Ithaca and all stayed here in my room in Brooklyn.  We had dinner at Taylor and Wes's and the next day a big party at Oddeye Taylor's store that was closing the next day.   The store not the business... Oddeye reborn actually today !  but now only online without the pesky overhead of renting a store space.

Will post some Karen photos soon...  I just made the contact sheets, and still need to develop 1 roll of b/w.  --posting this so I will push myself to get it done after work tmrw.  !!   xo

here's 1 crappy neg scan from right before the show

and then one of me after the show after I ate one of my roommate Jeska's weed chocolates whooooopsy...  ;)'        

terrible contact sheet scans this time... gotta make real scans with color corrections.

today was super fun at work, Michael did a guest spot on At Home with Amy Sedaris (Amy is the best comedian ever, she kills me always... I'm a HUGE fan of her since forever).   It's the third time I've gotten to go to her show -so spoiled (Michael's done 3 guest spots).   I wish I was able to take real photos from being there, but could only take a couple of iPhone snaps.   anyways it's also good not to take photos and just watch (that's what everyone says you should say, but really I wanted to take photos obv.)     Michael was super funny and looked like a Gaultier sailor man, he had to read a poem... something that had to do with a character Janis,... "it was Janis"..    I think Paul Dinelo wrote it.  He was on Strangers with Candy as Jellineck... I love that guy too.  I have a photo of Michael on set but don't think I can/should put it in here until after that episode airs.   xx  12/3/2019  

Sunday at Sylvias

It's always so awesome going to Sylvias.   Sylvia Plachy the world famous photographer (I have to remind her that often because she is so blindly humble and more concerned about all the stray cats she takes care of out in the gardens).  Anyways,  first thing we do when I get there on Sunday mornings is just talk and laugh in the kitchen while we are making earl grey tea with a shitload of grated fresh ginger, that I usually grate after she peels them.   Elliot her husband (of now over 50 years) comes in and says hi and then I try my best to remember super bad dirty jokes so we can all laugh even more.  Or he tells me equally bad dirty jokes.  That's usually the first 20 minutes of every time I work w Sylvia.

I will almost always work on scanning 10-30 of her negatives and then tediously remove the dust from the scans using photoshop.  Then we go print from those or others she has picked out.   I am always pushing us to print from the darkrooms at the ICP because besides darkroom prints being massively better than inkjets,  ICP has the best b/w darkrooms I've ever used.   They even have self-rocking print washers, basically they offer the Rolls Royce of darkrooms.  (Anyways we can't print there since they are moving and closed for 4 months.  But as luck has it they are opening 2 blocks from where I work everyday and it's going to be so awesomely awesome).   It's also so much fun to print with Sylvia in the darkroom, she knows exactly what she's doing in the darkroom, and how to achieve it  --digital printing is confusing to her and I end up having to do all that.

How she edits is the best thing I have learned working for her.   I don't know exactly how to explain it but she puts so much of how she looks at everything into a way that explains what she wants explained.  Simple sounding but crazy hard to do. She just had a museum show in Budapest Hungary and I didn't realize until she told me but I had printed almost all of that show!  And she gave me credit for it too at the museum.  

Okay but this last Sunday, it got very cold suddenly in New York, so after earl grey tea we started by going out into the gardens to winterize 6 outside cat houses.  It was pretty in-depth because we had to  really insulate + rain/show proof them.  It was a really fun way to start the day, I love that shit so much.  And as always she is so appreciative it made me feel golden.    She's not a crazy cat lady, she just loves living things and I love that.    She only has one cat that lives inside, Millie.  Millie was a stray kitten who was terrified of all the other stray cats and ran inside Sylvia's house one day and has never left.   I think she was a kitten when I first started working w Sylvia 5 years ago so she's now probably around 6 or 7.

I pulled these from a conact sheet in 2016, again so fun to see the contact sheet.  I had gone to see Radiohead at Madison Sq Garden the night before.  All this makes me so glad I moved to nyc 8 years ago.  xo

Well, I'm back

Now a hundred years later (bc i'm old like that) I'm coming back on here and will try to be current.   au courant Francine ...    2019! almost 2020.

   anyways i live in nyc now 8+ years and taking pictures all the fukkn time, showing basically nobody -- so that's the motivation of this blog  -stay current by showing current work  -but also throw in so much from the past since it's all mostly un-shown work. 

i've spent the last 5 years really archiving all of my films/ contact sheets (and I have a lot since, remember? i'm now ancient).   I love getting into contact sheet k-holes. I think I may change my entire website to crops from contact sheets and then work on making those selects into real photographs you can feel & touch.

 okay gunna just start throwing stuff out now. xo david   ps:


oh! and looks like it's not even a current!  jeezus.. oh well.  I decided to start with the last screenshot I just made.   And.. --i'm still currently working with michael full time, so that part is Au courant.  Francine.  (that's from john waters polyester, divine makes me pee my pants forever, love you divine ..one).


This is from the last r.e.m. tour, 2005 in a dressing room right after Michael finished shaving his head before the concert and I loved the chandelier (of course michael stipe has a chandelier in his dressing room. Damn, europe is so cool that way).  I was Michael's personal assistant on all of the r.e.m. tours 2001-2008 is how I always get these shots of him.

  

I'm going to show parts from each contact sheet when I post on here because they are the best story tellers of what happens in one roll of film.   This one shows a cute one of my xbf mike sleeping, must be in holland.    rolleiflex is such a beaut camera.  so dusty the photos i know but this was when I was first starting to archive and didn't really pay attention to so much dust on the outside of the plastic sleeves when i began scanning them.  the negs are clean i swear!   somehow the dust works tho.

gunna hit the sack now, i'm working w Sylvia tmrw.  She is my secret favorite sunday morning job (more about that later;)  xo