Disclaimer:
I wrote this over a two week period. There are definitely things that are missing and there are probably weird jumps in time.
I did not go back and read this, but I can guarantee that everything said is accurate and explains what I wanted to explain.
For a while, I didn’t care about photographer or take it seriously when I was participating in it, which was mostly me stealing my father camera to carry around with me while the kid and I were doing things together and having fun. During that time, because of the job I had that I would sometime frequent on my off days and sometimes have that same camera with me, I had some local musicians ask if I could photograph them, and I would do it because I enjoyed them as artists and some as people. But it was never something I thought I’d wanted to do outside of that. It wasn’t until 2008 when I needed some kind of imagery for a “beat tape” that I was working on that I had a spark of intrigue for photography as a creative outlet. (I’ve told this story before.) But it kind of stayed in the realm of “I just need some cover art” for about another 5 years because music was the focus.
I started playing around more in 2013 with some creative photography centered around portraits of women. You can thank Tumblr for that; there were a lot of dope photographers on there as well as a lot of sharing of older work from popular photographers of the past. (One of those photographers, Quintavius Oliver became a pretty good online friend.) Previous to this, I’d been checking out Suicide Girls and following a few of their models on various social media platforms. One of them that I’d been wanting to photograph posted that they were doing some traveling for modeling work and would be in my area, so I figured that was the perfect reason for me to finally buy a camera. And that’s what I did. I bought my first camera, a Nikon D3200, in September 2015 with the sole intent of photographing one specific model.
The camera that I’d been using up to that point was a Nikon CoolPix 8700; a “bridge camera”. I really had no idea of how to use a camera as I’d often had this one in aperture priority because my father, someone who went to school and what not for photography, told me it made it easier, so I just left it there. I’d learned a little in the two months that I had my new camera before this first shoot, but I was still far away from where I felt I should have been before bringing in a seasoned model to stand in front of it. But it was the beginning.
Over the next two years, I’d find various models on Model Mayhem to some trade work with to develop my skill and ability to work a camera. In 2017, I somehow found a cosplay group on Twitter and got with them for a big gathering/photo shoot that they had planned in San Francisco. That was something fun that I thought I’d be doing for a long while because I was a big comic book nerd and I enjoyed seeing what people could do with creating their own costumes. Photographing them would be fun. And it was. I made some friends from that shoot; both cosplayers and other photographers, a couple being both. I did the cosplay thing for about another years. Calling on some of the people that I met at that gathering to do some cosplay and non-cosplay modeling for me. During this cosplay time, I was still photographing non-cosplay models and came across a couple that I liked working with, but they didn’t last. I honestly think they didn’t like the work that I was doing. But in early 2018, my path shifted…
2018 was when I stepped into nude photography. My first shoot was with Allie Summers. Still thinking that I wanted to do the cosplay stuff as well, I went to Fanime to meet up with some of the cosplayer that I met the previous year to do some shooting at the convention center. I also did a few shoots with a cosplayer that I met in Anaheim at Power Morphicon that summer who happened to live 10 minutes away from me. I did a few boudoir style shoots, and in October of 2018, I was blessed with the opportunity to shoot someone that I’d been eying on Instagram for a while, Polly Ellens. Now I was official in my mind: I was able to work with people from overseas who also thought my work was good.
2019 was the year that I went all in on the nude photography. In January, I started what would become a frequent working relationship with an Internet favorite (especially Reddit), Devi. Devi was someone I found on Model Mayhem and had been wanting to work with for about 2 years, but didn’t think my skill was good enough for her yet. I was wrong and she let me know that during our first shoot. That was a big push for me. A few weeks later, Devi sent me a text message inviting me to her birthday party which was a big gathering of model and photographer, food, drinks, conversation, and a lot of photographing. This opened me up to some creativity seeing that there were people around who were willing to “try shit” in an effort to make art. And I would definitely utilize that in the future.
I started finding and working with more “art” models in the following months, doing a could of shoots with Diana Oliphant and Brooke Eva (if you know me, my redhead love is serious). But in April 2019, i found someone that I would collaborate with a lot of the years: Lavender (Diddy back then and forever to me). A true muse Lavender was and is. From meeting me at a San Francisco beach at 8:00 AM wearing nothing but a bikini to wearing a 420 themed Girl Scout outfit with a box of Thin Mints as a prop, she was down to try anything that I threw at her. This was also the time (that June) that I finally reached out to and got to work with another favorite and now friend of mine, Kisa Hues. We haven’t worked as much as I’d like over the past 6 years, but we created some amazing work the times that we have.
Summer of 2019 was when I first picked up a film camera and started on that journey. Starting with 35mm with a Canon Rebel G that I got from my father that had a strange and sometime cool defect of randomly not advancing the film and causing multiple exposures. I had two good shoots with that camera before I ruined a rolls of film at a shoot with Allie Summers by not rewinding the film even though it made the sounds like it was; ended up opening up the camera and exposing the whole roll. After I got home from that shoot, I went out to Looking Glass Photos and bought myself a Nikkormat FT3 and used that a couple of days later with Di. The shoot with Di was fun and a new adventure, into more erotic art.
A few more shoots with Lavender throughout the summer and fall, then 2020 came. That’s not a way to talk about Covid ruining things, but a way to talk about some cool new people I built creative relationships with and some new cameras that I got my hands on. At the end of 2019, I bought myself a Mamiya M645 1000S. Medium format! as you can see, I fell in love with shooting film. In January 2020, I took my first trip out to Seattle, Washington to work with India Williams; someone that I’d been plotting on working with for about a year. (Side note: It’s a great feeling when people that you really want to work with are down and excited to work with you as well.) The film from this shoot with India was the first shoot that I developed color film from (my second roll, the first being shot two days before I got on the plane for this trip).
Now I knew that I could successfully travel outside of Oakland/San Francisco to create this art. Not only was this Seattle trip a first for collaborating with India, but it also helped me figure out where I wanted to move to after deciding that it was time to get out of Oakland. That wouldn’t come for another 4 years, though.
2020 was the beginning of Covid, and that did slow down my work a bit. The entire year, I had 7 shoots, including the one with India, and four of them were with, my now little homie, Lavender; we’d been having fun and getting creative throughout the year. That summer, thanks to all of the overtime that I’d been working at my day job due to Covid layoffs, I decided to splurge and buy myself a new camera. I initially bought myself a Bronica S2A that I fell in love with a couple of test rolls put through it, but shortly found out that there was a light leak in the film back, followed by the camera getting jammed and the shop unable to fix it without a completed tear-down (the Nikkor lens on that thing was AMAZING, so I was sad to let it go). So… I added another $1,200 to the cost of the S2A and got myself a Hasselblad 500C/M. Good luck finding one of these for $1,500 now; shop even though in a metered prism viewfinder with it for the trouble I’d had with the Bronica. Now I was all in on film and put my D3200 in a cabinet and didn’t touch it again, eventually gave it to a friend a year later. I ended 2020 with an overdue shoots with both Devi and Tasha.
Also, the summer of 2020 was when I started creating my photo books due to having so much down time and not being able to shoot like I wanted to. Create Vol. 1. This wasn’t meant to be a series of books, it wasn’t even called Vol. 1 initially. It was just something that I wanted to do for myself because I love photo books and have the material and ability to create my own. But creating photo books became a thing that I’d keep doing for the next 4 years.
I started off 2021 with another trip to Seattle to shoot with India again. This began what would become National India & Bishop Shoot Weekend as we unintentionally planned the shoot for the same weekend two years in a row, the weekend prior to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And with my having a thing for consistency and anniversary, I decided that this was now a thing as long as India was available for it. I had two more shoot after this one, one on Valetine’s Day with Lavender and Cassidy and another the following week with Aakriti. Then I had to sit down, well rather lay down, for the next 4 months after having my tibia fractured by someone who wasn’t paying attention to where they were driving. Two good things that came from this down time were my finally trying Capture One and deciding to ditch Lightroom for it (also dropping Photoshop for Affinity Photo), and deciding to get back into digital photography again (once I was able to walk again) after a year of only shooting and developing film and bought myself a Nikon Z 5.
My first shoot after getting back on my feet was that July. Followed by a shoot with Brooke Eva. Then I got two of my favorite people together for an early dinner and shoot; Lavender and babyghost. A few more shoots followed this including one with Devi and one with Lavender.
I released Create Vol. 2: 2020-2021 on January 13, 2022.
Unfortunately, 2022 did not begin with a National India & Bishop Shoot Weekend as India had temporarily stopped modeling (I hope that’s right). The year was supposed to start with me taking a trip to shoot another new model that I’d wanted to shoot for several months, but the week before I was suppose to get on the plane, I got hit with the Covid. After two weeks off from my day job to recover, I decided that it was time for me to quit that job. So I took the money that I was able to get back from the Airbnb, studio rental, and what I was going to use to pay the model (unfortunately, Alaska Air was only willing to give me a credit) and put in my two week notice. For the next two months, I took some time to relax and get myself right mentally after 12 years of a horrible job. Of course, I did some shooting during this time.
I kicked off a slow building series of shoots of me covering nude women in paint with Lavender that would come back again in 2023. I later started a new day job and wouldn’t have my next shoot until June when I got a message from Elilith Noir. This was followed by getting B. in what I have started calling The White Room which started with my 2021 shoot with Tasha and an earlier shoot in 2022 with Melissa Mariah. After a second shoot with Linda, it was time to head out to Pasadena for Power Morphicon 2022, because NERD. While in Pasadena, I had my first shoot with another favorite of mine, Luci Lane; some nice nudes in the hot August L.A. sun. This duo will come back later. 2022 ended with the first Bishop and Kisa Hues shoot since 2019.
2023… National India & Bishop Shoot Weekend is back! Back in Pasadena, I rented a cool boxing gym for a few hours and had some fun, finally, shooting India again. This was the beginning of me really trying to get creative with the environment and themes of shoot instead of just bedrooms and couches; although I’d still be doing a lot of that because it’s just as cool. The next weekend, it was finally time to take a trip out to Portland. Remember how I said, I discovered traveling to create this art? That came back. Kayla Coyote! Kayla was the person that I was supposed to shoot in 2022 before Covid got me. We managed to make it happen a year later. This shoot was just something that I wanted to do for myself, but I ended up being commissioned to use one set from this shoot in Goodies Magazine after I reached out to them about how I could contribute to what they were doing. They saw a sample photo from that shoot on Twitter and wanted to know if there was more. Yes. There was more, and now it can be seen in Goodies Magazine Issue 13.
The Goodies Magazine feature was big for me as that has been a goal of mine for a long time; to have my work featured in a cool nudie magazine. So of course I asked if they would be willing to have me featured in a future issue. But before that, I had to go back home and shoot Jenny Sakura. We created some amazing images for my fishnet series as well as The White Room. There’s one more person who I’d been plotting with for about a year and a half, so in June I bought a plane ticket and jumped a plane to New York to meet up with who I now call my Twin, AJ. To this day, she is probably the person who has outwardly shown the most excitement about creating with me. And that’s not a slight to anyone else, just showing extra love to her. We had an amazing shoot, which consisted of a lot of talking between shots, even though we’d done a lot of that over Instagram the past year. We walked into the studio co-workers and walked out BFF’s and twins (we share the same birthday; something we found out at the end of the shoot). Time to go back home…
Next trip was off to Southern California again, in hot August, to meet up with Luci because Goodies was interested in having her featured in the magazine. I also planned a shoot with India, as well as last minute sending messages back and forth with Tundra Dahmer, someone I’d never spoken to prior, before I boarded my plane to meet me at my Airbnb when I landed in a hour to shoot something. I got three dope shoots out of this weekend; one that resulted in my second feature in Goodies Magazine, one that both made up for missing out of National India & Bishop Shoot Weekend 2022 as well as what would become issue 7 of my The Raw zine series, and a dope set with a new model who I was able to bring into my The Bunny series slash pet project. I had one more shoot a few weeks later with Elilith Noir that ended my shooting for the year.
National India & Bishop Shoot Weekend 2024! This one was a fun one for me, both the shoot and the result of it. I found a cool 90s themed space to shoot in and put together a wardrobe for India. This shoot turned in my first themed, hardcover photo book, Welcome To The 90s. The entire book was designed and published by me (through Blurb); something that I had already been doing with Create and The Raw, but bigger. Then came a small break. My day job sent me on a work trip out of state which resulted in me getting the opportunity to move out to Washington to work at a new location. A welcomed opportunity because moving to a whole new state on your own and hoping you can find a job before you run out of money was a scary thought. Once all of that was organized and I was ready to go, I had to get one more shoot in. This one was super dope for me…
You know by now that Lavender is a very frequent collaborator of mine. A couple of times she’d mentioned that she loved the work that I’d with Kisa Hues. Well, around this time they’d crossed paths and become buddies. So we all got together in a group chat to plot something before I left, and it turned into a very dope 4-5 shoot around Sebastopol. Due to what was coming up next, I still haven’t gotten around to finish up culling and editing the 800 photographs from that day.
Now I’m in Washington starting a new life, away from everything I knew. And that’s a good thing. That’s what I’ve been wanting for the past 5 years. But it’s taking some time to get everything right. Summer’s here and that means Power Morphicon 2024. So back to Pasadena I go. The last day of August a.k.a. The Hottest Day In L.A. a.k.a. Shoot Day With Luci Lane. Also, shoot number two with Tundra Dahmer. Then I get back home to my new upstairs neighbors. This drained everything in me mentally. I forced myself to complete it, but the only thing that I was able to do during this time was complete Welcome To The 90s. If you’ve ever lived in an apartment in a not so great building with inconsiderate people living above you, you can probably understand what I went through.
But I ended the year by finishing this book and releasing it in January 2025, on the Friday of India & Bishop Shoot Weekend; unfortunately, due to the aforementioned situation and trying to get finances together to fix it, I wasn’t able to make a shoot with India happen. But three months later, a magical thing happened. I got a message from Lavender saying that she would be in Washington, in my area, and that we should get together to do something; of course we shoot (and talk and eat). The magical thing about this shoot, that I only realized a few days later when going through some of our older work, is that it fell on the exact date of our very first shoot six years prior, April 27th. (Another funny thing about that is that Lavender and I snuck in one more shoot before I left for Washington the previous year with Zoe on April 26th. That date I had in my head and was a little disappointment that we couldn’t get a shoot in a day before in 2025 only to find out later that that extra made it even more special.)
Another little break happened while I got settle into a NEW place after moving. But then two things happened very close together: 1) I saw a post on Instagram from Kayla Coyote saying was looking to do more shooting, and 2) Wu-Tang was on tour and would be in Portland in July. The latter being a bucket list show to see for me, I was definitely going. I felt it was only right to reach out to Kayla to see if she was down to shoot something and she was. Even better, she was down to shoot something that I’d be wanting to shoot for the past ten years; a tribute to Ol’ Dirty Bastard and his 1995 Rap Pages cover, which itself was a tribute to Janet Jackson’s 1993 Rolling Stone cover. We did it, and it was dope! I might share it one day; right now it only exists as a 20×20-inch framed print in my studio.
And now we’re here. At the end of my 10th year as a serious photographer. It’s not the end of my photography journey. That’s not what this writing is about. But it is a milestone for me. 10 years is big, and the evolution and progression of what I’ve created and achieved over the past 10 years has been great. And there’s things that I didn’t include here. There’s been a lot. Although this is not an end, it is a place where I will be shifting gears. For a 5 year period from 2019 to 2024, I’d abandoned music. The thing that made me pick up a camera in the first place. It wasn’t because of photography that my music was neglected, it was something that just physically couldn’t be done due to living situations. And now that I’m set up in a new place where I can now have all of my equipment in my own space, I really want to catch up on all of the things that I had planned musically before I had to put them aside; continuing my Raw Beats series of beat tapes, working on a The Shit 4, and creating Bishop Jackson EP 3. All of these things will be happening, but very recently, I’ve realized that I’m also burnt out on “the Internet” and social media. That started to feel like a job when it came to sharing my art and having to “stay relevant”. And with that feeling like a job, when I already have a job that I work to eat and being able to have these things to create my art, it was draining the creativity and motivation to do anything. So I’m working on my own time and at my own pace. If it takes 3 months for me to share anymore art, it takes 3 months. If it takes 2 years, it takes 2 years. I have to create for myself first and not just to sell the world something. (I have thoughts and deeper reasons as to why I’ve decided to step away from the Internet with my art, both for my photography and my music, that I’ll definitely discuss here later. But that’s for another time.)
With my 10 year story told, I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve brought the world’s eye over the years and I hope you’re ready to see and hear what I bring to the eyes and ears of the world over the next 10 years; however frequent or infrequent that ends up being. But just know, I do have some interesting ideas already in motion for both. Thank you for the support you’ve given me over the years and I look forward to that support over the next few. You can keep up with everything I’m doing here on this blog (and on projectalphabetsoup.xyz if you know about and are interested in my third thing), and although I am no longer on any social media or Patreon, you can still support financially by buying any of my books or my prints. The money goes into creating more art.