Snagged

I was stoked to discover yesterday, during my weekly page-through of the Village Voice, that one of my pool pictures made it into the Voice's annual Best of NY issue. My longtime photo editor there, Staci Schwartz, was kind enough last week to email me a long list of things for which she needed photos. One of the photos she was looking for was "a closeup of a cool tattoo on someone’s arm or someone getting tattooed." A picture I had taken recently at Doc Holliday's was the first image that came to mind. It was a picture of an outstretched hand with a huge fish hook embedded in it. The picture up top I think has a little more depth to it. I like the pool table in the background. But the one at right is the one I submitted to the Voice because it shows the tattoos a lot more clearly. If I ever run into that guy again at Doc Holliday's I'm sure he'll appreciate that I got the photo into the Voice. I remember asking him about the hook and him saying something along the lines of "Yeah, straight out of Serpico." I'll have to watch that movie sometime and see what he's talking about. At any rate, that's definitely my favorite thing about freelancing—getting the "Do you have any photos of_____?" calls or emails. Incidentally, these two photos were shot on film. And so whenever people see my Leica and ask "Is that a digital camera?" I always go on to tell them how ironic it is that my "personal work" mostly ends up on the web, in the form of digital scans from negatives. Whereas all my "work work" is done digitally, primarily for newspapers, and ends up being reproduced as halftone images on grimy newsprint. Regardless of the medium, it's always rewarding whenever any of my "personal work" gets published.