David Lachapelle and David Salle for NYT

I am going to run a series I did in the fall 2001 for Fortune, it was never published, I’m not sure why. The story was to interview people in malls and get their reactions to the new terror threat that was being floated, that malls were targets around Halloween and Thanksgiving 2001.

I think there are a lot of echos going on after the recent killing of OBL, no sooner was his body “eased” into the Indian Ocean than we had everyone telling us there could now be new threats, reprisals, etc. It never seems to end. The new vigilance is the old vigilance.

I think the Newsweek feature on Special Ops in light of Seal Team 6 is interesting, and no matter how we try to understand and be sensitive to Islam, we never seem to do it right (re; burial of OBL).

Another interesting similarity is the cultural fascination with eschatology-”end times”-2012 currently and Nostradamus then.

Look for more in the coming days.

In light of my recent posts about older working methods, part of the interest here for me is to try to connect with the kind of spontaneity I had or thought I had at the time. It was not about lighting or styling or anything but seeing.

This NY mag shoot had at the time I am told one of the highest lab bills ever for a FOB quarter page story…

This was around the time that Jonathan Lethem wrote “Motherless in Brooklyn,” and he knew the location well. I shot about 5 packs of polaroid 665 and dropped the whole thing off at Markheim for contacting. Except I forgot that they would charge me for washing, clearing, fixing and then contacting…about 500 dollars on top of the 120 colour and black and white I shot, and we hadn’t even gotten to prints. I got all of 150 I think for a FOB quarter page, so that didn’t really make sense huh?

What interests me today is the fact that I would go on jobs and shoot polaroid, 120, some 35, colour and black and white. That just doesn’t happen any more….Still, not making much more for FOB…and the location turned out to be a block from where I live now, so I was a full 7 years ahead of myself. Maybe you can tell above, one of those hot, flat, humid August days.

Only one column so I helped it out a bit. Thanks to Brendan and Demetri, and everyone at CBS who pitched in- I didn’t bring that 10K lighting up the background…

photobooth

used bookstore

wandering…