New Small Magazine Shoot

The new issue of Small Magazine just came out, and I thought I'd share it. Many thanks to my talented art director and set designer Valerie Mangum and wardrobe stylist Aften Owens.

All images © Nick Prendergast

New York Times Magazine - Fourteen Actors Acting

Every year, New York Times Magazine approaches a photographer to create a portfolio of the year's most acclaimed actors. This year, they tapped Solve Sundsbo to create minute-long video 'screen tests' of fourteen actors including James Franco, Natalie Portman, Tilda Swinton and Michael Douglas to name a few. The resulting vignettes are at once beautiful, strange, and mesmerizing. Watch it for yourself here.

Benjamin Hubert - Tetanus Jewelry

© Nick Prendergast

This is Benjamin Hubert. Aside from being an extremely cool guy and helpful hand on set, he's also the designer of some truly amazing jewelry and accessories made from bugs, bones, teeth, fire, stones, found objects, antique and oxidized metals. His one of a kind pieces make for great gifts. Go to his website and buy something now.

Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

This was going to be an album review post, but - as fun it was to write a record review, rife with insight into the music-making process and the progression of the artist - this isn't a music blog. So I'm going to concentrate on another aspect of Kanye's creativity: his visual endeavors.

Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Kanye is never boring. While he may be the only pop artist ever to be called a jackass by a sitting president, Yeezy is definitely more than the sum of his Twitter rants and Award Show hyjinx. The dude may be a little weak behind the mic at times (and a mostly tone-deaf singer, hence the heavy reliance on auto-tune), but he is untouchable in the way he communicates his image and his music visually.

Having finished his 'College' series with it's iconic teddy bear mascot, Kanye released 2009's '808s and Heartbreak', an album cover featuring a deflated heart-shaped balloon being pulled apart by graffiti-artist-turned-fine-art-phenom KAWS' signature white-gloved hands. The portrait of Kanye inside showed a more subdued side of the artist wearing shades and a broken heart pin on his suit's lapel, also surrounded by KAWS' artwork.

Add to that his incredibly detailed and expensive live tour stage set that looked like the surface of the moon, and you begin to get a picture of how seriously this guy takes his performance art.

It's been a (needlessly) controversial year since then, and Kanye has only become more focused on his passion for visual art. His new album, aside from musically being his strongest artistic statement to date, is also pertinent to his visual progression. Let's begin with the album art, which I thought was incredible: no title, not even an artist name; just a picture of a dark-skinned party monster being straddled by a fair-complected, winged and polka-dot-tailed female nude. 

For reasons that I cannot fully understand or condone, this album art was banned due to the unfortunate, but unavoidable influence of the most powerful music seller in the world. When I went to buy the album online, this is the album art that came with it:

What a shame. But I digress...

Ever the ambitious artist, Kanye also directed the 35 minute short film/music video "Runaway" to accompany the release of Fantasy, with mixed - but mostly positive results. As directorial debuts go, this shows confidence in spades. From the dependence on visual effects to the large set pieces to the attempt to create a narrative out of a medley of songs from the record - Runaway should have been a disaster. while it may not be a masterpiece, it definitely avoids disaster status.

But, like they said on Reading Rainbow - You don't have to take my word for it:

Blurb Book

I had heard about Blurb Books from another photographer who had used their website to make his printed portfolio. It looked great, like a coffee table book filled with his own work.

My wife and I had talked a few months earlier about how one of the really disappointing aspects of digital vs. film was the loss of the printed snapshot. For years, we had kept numerous photo albums of our travels, pictures of friends and family. But as I switched to digital, all those kinds of snapshots went to live on a computer hard drive, never really to be seen again.

As a response to that complaint, I decided to make a book from the hundreds of photos we shot on our trip to Europe this past summer. It's a 12" by12" bound book with an 'Image Wrap' cover and premium luster paper.

The print quality isn't quite as dynamic as I would have liked, but as a document of a great trip, it's perfect. I gave it to my wife for her birthday, and she says it's the best and most thoughtful gift she's ever been given. How's that for an endorsement?

Behind-The-Scenes: Web Gallery - 1st Draft

Spent a couple of hours whittling a recent shoot down to this. Got a lot of whittling to go...

Gallus - Cycle Shots

Every couple of months, I shoot some images for my buddy Jeremy's company, Gallus. Each bespoke bicycle is painstakingly custom-measured for it's future owner, hand-cut, sanded, and welded by Jeremy himself, and his work is beautiful.

As a relative outsider to the cycling world, I never knew how much precision and artistry went into the process of building a bike from scratch. I'm trying to shoot video of the entire process, but in the meantime - I thought might share a few pics from our latest session...

I want one.