Make love to the camera

I did six photo shoots today. One photo shoot sucks your soul. Six pretty much make you god’s whore. I always felt a good portrait session was a lot like a good fuck. You warm them up, you encourage them into a kind of pare and slowly you start directing them, start reading them, start manipulating them, then lure out their inner soul to the surface, then you delve right into the person. By the end you can read each other’s mind, they know exactly what you want them to do by the most simple command, and they comply, because its all good. And then it’s over. You take each other’s email address, promise to keep in contact, and they leave feeling great, but a little empty inside; a little robbed. Me? I feel tired, fulfilled, at peace, until the next stirring.

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I have less than 10 name cards left, including the one I’m using as a bookmark in Celine’s “Castle To Castle”. Running out of name cards is always an exciting time, because it means you need to make more, which means you need to do something even cooler than the last batch. Our new cards should be ready in the next day or two. Let me tell you about them. The front side is printed on a material that resembles, and feels like, suede. It’s a very expensive paper but it’s worth it. We have 6 versions of the front, each has a different pattern based on ink bleeding into watercolour paper. There will also be a debossed butterfly stamped into the front. The back is a textured paper, something like really gaudy wallpaper, with an exquisite, etched pattern on glossy card. It’s supposed to be unnerving, the trashy flashiness of the back, next to the natural elegance of the front. I think I fucked the back up though (these are 2 of the 6 versions of the front, by the way). The back looks too hideous, like a neon popsicle that has melted into pure sugar.
I’ve put this blog address on some of the cards. Partly to push myself to draw more, and partly because we’ve got a few jobs because of this blog, weirdly enough. Sometime my clients tell me “I was reading your blog yesterday,” and I assume they are going to say “and I think we won’t be doing any more business with you.” But they usually say something like “I didn’t know you were so odd, can you redesign something for us please?” It feels a little wrong, like the time I had a partially nude girl on my name card and I walked on to the exit ramp at a press conference and forced the president of Mitsubishi to take a card. It all happened so fast, the security didn’t know what to do, and I was back in the press section in a flash after he took it, looking completely confused. He never called me, but it all made sense at the time.
Well, we soldier on, I suppose.