The Village Voice, Over & Out…

After 62 wonderful years, the final print edition of The Village Voice got dropped into the familiar red boxes on the streets of New York this morning.

Besides looking back at six decades of Voice history, the issue features a photo essay by Celeste Sloman of some the people who have worked for the paper over the years. She shot everyone at a final party that was held a week ago at the Downtown Community Television Center in TriBeCa. Portraits of Robert Christgau, Sylvia Plachy, Michael Musto, Lucian Truscott IV, Peter Noel, Robert Newman, Amy Taubin, Jerry Saltz, Joe Conason, Joe Levy, Guy Trebay, James Hamiltom, Susan Brownmiller, original publisher Ed Fancher and many, many, many more graced 50 pages of the issue. It payed respect to these people in a way never before seen at the end of a publications lifespan. It was gorgeous.

I’ve only been contributing to the collective history of the paper for the past couple of years. My pal Andrew Horton got me in shortly after he became Design Director. It wasn’t a lot, but it was honestly some of the best work I’ve ever done.

I am going to miss The Voice. Terribly…

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Kurt Andersen For The Village Voice

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As the Village Voice ends it’s 62 year run as New York’s best alternative newspaper in a couple of weeks, I was given a last opportunity to contribute one more portrait session to the time capsule. Photo Editor Andrea Maurio asked me to meet author, editor, radio host and Bon Vivant Kurt Andersen in a park in Brooklyn…here’s how it went…

Setting up under the trees…

Kaz under ambient light, overcast…I sure hope that Sun pops out…

Add the 3′ Profoto RFI…

Insert subject, press the button…

Kurt was on a tight schedule, but for a quick second shot we just had to turn the camera 45 degrees South for this view under a row of trees…

Kale Friesen was also helping out that day…he got to be Macbeth Boy…

This was OK…

…but I told Kale to go grab one of the cafe chairs we saw on the other side of the park…

That did it.

Here’s how it looks in print…

And you can read the story online HERE

The Voice has two weeks to go in it’s print life. Go out and pick up a copy while you still can.

Silence = Death

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Last week, Andrea Maurio at the Village Voice asked me to photograph the five surviving members of the Silence = Death Collective for this years ‘Pride’ issue.

For the first time in years, the five guys who created a poster consisting of a pink triangle set against a black background with the words “Silence = Death” below it, would be together at the same time for a 30 year commemorative gathering at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Because of the event, we weren’t going to have a lot of time to shoot, but I still had to come away with a group shot and individual portraits of each guy. And because of all the people attending the event, shooting a group photo inside the gallery would be impossible. We decided to use the outside of the building…

The Silence = Death Collective: L-R, Avram Finkelstein, Charles Kreloff, Jorge Socarras, Brian Howard & Christopher Lione

After a very quick five minutes on the sidewalk, we moved back inside to a small office we commandeered as our portrait studio for the individual photos…

The Village Voice Pride Issue is out today and you can read the story How Six NYC Activists Changed History With “Silence = Death”

Special thanks to Avram, Charles, Jorge, Brian & Christopher for allowing me the opportunity to photograph them, and to Andrea Maurio and Ashley Smestad Velez for the great assignment.

Bo Dietl Wants Your Vote For Mayor Of New York City!!!

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Bo Dietl wants to be Mayor of New York City, and Ashley Smestad Vélez from the Village Voice sent me up to his office for a look around. Here’s what we found…

Here’s how it looks in today’s Village Voice…

Bradley Tusk Hates Bill De Blasio

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Bradley Tusk is a lot of things. He was the Deputy Governor of Illinois, the Communications Director for Senator Chuck Schumer, he’s the driving force behind Uber’s dominance in New York, he’s working to keep online sports betting sites like FanDuel up & running and he was Mike Bloomberg’s campaign manager. But right now, his primary focus is to make sure that current New York Mayor Bill De Blasio never gets a second term. He is aggressively searching for anyone who can defeat De Blasio in the next Democratic primary. And Mr. Horton needed me to capture that bulldog attitude for a feature on Tusk in the Village Voice. Here’s how it went…

Tusk Strategies had just moved into new offices and there wasn’t a whole lot of window dressing to work with…

…but this looked promising and showed the lean, mean layout of the place…

…but Kaz and I dropped a seamless for some portraits as well…

The lighting for the office space shot was super simple…a couple of bare skim lights aimed directly at Tusk with nothing more but whatever ambient light there was floating around. We did white balance the shot extremely cool to keep the mood a little chilly…

The seamless allowed us a distraction-free setup where I could really focus on Bradley’s expressions…

Here is how it looked in the Voice…and I can’t thank Ashley Smestad Vélez enough for her amazing layout…great design helps OK photography every time…

Broad Sword Battles…In Harlem

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A couple of weeks ago Mr. Horton sent Kaz and I up to the New York Historical Fencing Association in East Harlem to shoot some women who like to get their ‘Game Of Thrones’ on by bashing each other in duels using broad swords!

What fun!!!

Here we go…

Andrew did me proud with a wonderful layout in this week’s Village Voice…

Thanks to Andrew and the Voice for another great opportunity and special thanks to the Women Warriors at the NYHFA…Rebecca Glass, Laura McBride, Tanya Smith and Deena Sadek…who made it look so damned mean!!!

The Federation Of Black Cowboys

This was one of those situations that shows you never know where the flow of your career is gonna take you. Andrew Horton…the Creative Director at The Village Voice…asked if I wanted to shoot some Black Cowboys…in Queens. The Federation of Black Cowboys is a group of urban cowpokes whose goal is to promote knowledge of the “Black West”. Their Ponderosa for the past two decades is a ramshackle stable just off Conduit Boulevard in Howard Beach, but recently their membership has dwindled to around 20 die-hards and now they face losing the license agreement for the stables. Andrew and I wanted my portraits to capture a gritty, iconic essence of what it is to be a Cowboy…and we also agreed that our touchstone style should be an homage to Richard Avedon’s In The American West. So off to Queens we went…

Unlike Avedon, I wasn’t going to drag out the 8×10 and set up a North-Light studio in the shadow of a barn…

Instead, we decided to make a huge wall of soft light by putting up the biggest lights I own…

The only problem is, when you fly a 79″ parabolic light in 25mph wind as we had that day, the shit hits the fan awfully fast. Even with over 100lbs of sandbags on each 50lb Matthews Stand, it was like trying to hold down a racing sailboat in a Regatta! But I didn’t care…Kaz had to deal with it…

But our basic setup was pretty similar to Avedon’s…a simple white seamless set up on the North side of one of the stables…

And here’s how things turned out…

Arthur “J.R.” Fulmore…

“Mama” Kesha Morse…

“Mountain Man” Ellis Harris…

Even though we had always conceived the shoot as a high-contrast Black & White series, we still wanted to see how things looked in color…

…but in the end, the B&W was just too strong, and here’s how it looks in this week’s Village Voice…

Thanks to Andrew for giving me the opportunity to hang with some real cool cats…and special thanks to J.R., Kesha and Mountain Man for opening up the stables to a Dude from the City…