On the last day of South By Southwest I got to photograph a boxing match. My friend Keith Underwood is a tattoo artist and a boxer and he started a boxing promotion company called Underwood Promotions. They had this idea of doing a boxing match during SXSW called SXSW Slugfest that would feature both boxing and live music music. It worked out and became an official SXSW event taking place at the Moody Theater the home of Austin City Limits.

I know Keith because of my work with Sailor Jerry. He apprenticed under Mike Malone who worked under the Sailor Jerry himself and took over Jerry’s shop after he died. Keith has continued the legacy and we have done a bunch of tattoo events together for Sailor Jerry.  It only made sense for Sailor Jerry to sponsor the event and the tattooed ring girls wore Sailor Jerry shirts. Musically the event featured a rockabilly band called The Octanes who played before the boxing started. Between matches hip hop artists MC Doughbeezy and Young Jay performed. Zach Blair of Rise Against played the National Anthem before the main event.

As far as the boxing goes, I am just gonna post all the info from the website.  because I don’t know a goddamn thing about boxing outside of watching every movie about sports ever made. I mean, I loved Tyson back in the day but my love of boxing ended right around the time he bit Holyfield’s ear off. I do own a George Foreman grill though…

Carlos Trevino vs Manuel Rubalacava – Manny Mondragon vs Tyler Pacheco – Prisco Marquez vs Tanner Dodd  – Iskander Kharsan vs Richard Munoz

The main event was Reshard Hicks vs Adan Ahumada for the World Boxing Bureau Intercontinental Title. Check out the official results here.

Hicks pretty much destroyed Ahumada and only the first match went the distance but all of the matches were pretty entertaining. I had never photographed boxing before and honestly I had a blast. I was so close that a couple times I got hit with the ropes when the boxers would crash into them. I had some blood spatter less than two inches from my arm which was pretty great too. I mean as long as didn’t get in my face right?

I took so many damn photos and I edited them down to just over 100. I don’t think I got any shots that were the perfect boxing shot that I imagine when I think about boxing photography but I got a lot of shots I was pretty happy with. I would love to shoot more boxing. I think if I knew the sport better and had more experience shooting matches I could get pretty good at it. Sports photography in general is so specialized but with boxing you sort of have to just “spray and pray” a bit because you never know when that big punch is coming. I feel like those big moments would be a little more intuitive if I watched more boxing.

Anyway, the boxing was a blast and I hope I get to do it again. I hope you guys click through this gallery because some of this stuff is really fun.

Click here to see all the photos from Underwood Promotions: SXSW Slugfest at the Moody Theater in Austin, TX.

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This is going to be a massive post. In one single update I am going to be posting over 400 photos from six parties over a three day period that account for nearly everything I did at South By Southwest. I thought about breaking it up with a separate update for each party or each day, but I am exhausted after a week in Austin and I have one of the biggest gigs of my week tomorrow and then I am headed out of town to see my family so I wanted to get everything up as soon as possible. So let’s break this down!

Every day from Wednesday through Friday Brooklyn Bowl threw two parties at the Scoot Inn on Austin’s east side. The parties started at 1pm and went to 1am every night. The whole event was sponsored by Harley Davidson and Sailor Jerry who just happened to be my clients for the event. Aside from photographing the bands I was on hand to photograph people getting free haircuts from local barber Teddy Sloan thanks to Sailor Jerry and free air brush tattoos from Harley Davidson. Harley also had a bunch of bikes on hand and a training bike so you could learn how to ride a Harley. I should also give a shout out to High Brew coffee who sponsored the “Roadie Lounge” which was air conditioned and had free coffee. They aren’t a client of mine but I am pretty sure I would have not survived without all that caffeine.

Now let’s go through this party by party! Day one featured the Brooklyn Bowl party during day and the This Song Is Sick party at night. R&B artist Son Little and indie/folk Hop Along were the highlights of the day party but I honestly enjoyed all of the bands. The night party was mostly DJs. The absurd Party Pupils were, if nothing else, highly entertaining. They got the crowd both dancing and laughing. Louis Futon brought out a trumpet player to play along with his DJ set and Classixx headlined with a DJ set of their own.

Day two had the Consequence of Sound party during the day and the Brooklyn Vegan showcase at night. The Consequence of Sound party was actually my favorite event even though I am not sure the bands made any sense together. A band called Hinds from Span opened up and they were on their 7th of 14 SXSW shows. That is madness and it’s the kinda thing that leads to some terrible shows, but even for a 2pm set they were really enjoyable. Even their soundcheck was fun when they started covering Beatles songs they didn’t know the lyrics to. Chicago rapper Kweku Collins played next and put on a great show, but I was just happy because he dropped his beer so I ran and got him another drink in a Sailor Jerry cup so I could get some good branded photos. Is it weird that nailing a branded shot is a highlight? Sunflower Bean were really fun to watch. It’s weird that I don’t even remember what they sounded like, but I really liked photographing them. Photography has broken my brain. Headlining was Dr. Octagon which is the alter ego of legendary rapper Kool Keith with music by legendary producer Dan the Automator and legendary DJ DJ Qbert. It was really amazing to see them all together on stage. I remember my friend Keith shoplifted Dr. Octctagonecologyst from Tower Records for me when we were in high school and I had that CD in my car for years. Also, I got a shot of Dan and Just Blaze together which was pretty iconic even if it’s just a mediocre party photo. The Brooklyn Vegan party was headlined by Ted Leo and Wye Oak but the highlight for me was this band Bully who gives me a nostalgia boner for every female fronted band I listened to in the early ’90s i.e. anything with a Deal sister in it.

Day three was all about Relix Magazine. The magazine started out many years ago as a Grateful Dead newsletter so it’s day party “Tribute to Jerry Garcia” makes a lot of sense. Aside from the bands that played, the day party featured a bunch of exclusive clips from a documentary about Willie Nelson’s roadie Ben “Lovey” Dorsey called King of The Roadies. Willie Nelson’s daughter Amy Lee Nelson co-directed the movie and was on hand to show the clips and talk about the film. There was also an auction to raise money for Live Like Lovey, a charity that helps roadies founded after the death of Ben Dorsey by the fellow roadies who took care of him late in life. The afternoon ended with the Texas Gentlemen doing a Grateful Dead cover set with a bunch of guest musicians stepping in to play. It may come as a huge shock to you guys that I am not a huge Grateful Dead fan, but I did own Skeletons from the Closet when I was 10 and I was totally singing along to about a half dozen songs.  Bonus: My friend Sam and I sang Truckin’ karaoke at a fair when we were in the 5th grade. The parties ended with another Relix event that featured Hiss Golden Messenger and headliners Okkervill River.

Okay, that’s all I got. The rest of my SXSW was spent eating BBQ & mexican food and trying to avoid going downtown. I did photograph And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead for Rolling Stone, but I didn’t take enough photos to justify a post.  The only other post I will have from SXSW is a great one and should be up tomorrow: SXSW Slugfest! Until then go look at this massive gallery from the Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion!

Click here to see all the photos from the SXSW Brooklyn Bowl Family Reunion at Scoot Inn in Austin, TX.

Once again, I am leaving for South By Southwest in Austin, TX. Between the last decade covering it as media and the years I was going as a music manager I have been roughly 15 years in a row. I thought it was 14 actually but if you include 2004 and this year that’s 15 right? Who cares? Anyway, I love Austin but SXSW is kinda a shitshow now, but at least the food is good, I get to see a ton of old friends and I am working my ass off while I am there.

If you happen to be in Austin for SXSW you should RSVP for the Brooklyn Bowl party that I’m shooting. It’s at the Scoot Inn on the East Side and it’s sponsored by Sailor Jerry and Harley Davidson who also happen to be the people who hired me so go buy some rum and a motorcycle but not at the same time. I am also shooting this boxing match mixed with music because of course on Saturday that should be pretty interesting. I’ve never actually shot a boxing match before which should be fun.

Also if you are in town you should go see the movie Wobble Palace which my brother edited. It’s in the film festival and I really enjoyed it. Here’s the RogerEbert.com review if you want to know more about it. Quick tangent, my brother also edited the TV show Take My Wife and both seasons are now available on iTunes. It’s about a queer couple trying to make it in comedy together while also trying to make sure their relationship doesn’t fall apart. It’s really, really fucking good and totally relatable despite me being a straight white dude and all. Here’s a review of that too…

Okay, since I probably won’t update this again until next week let me plug stuff as always. You can get my books and zines here . And since I am gonna be gone for a while I uploaded a mini gallery of my friend Meg to Girls of Driven By Boredom. I did a shoot with her yesterday and at the end fucked around with my new LED lights. I will post the real shoot on here eventually but the mini shoot at the end is up on Girls of DBB now.

Okay, that’s all I got. Make sure to check out my Twitter and Instagram while I am gone for a ton of stuff from SXSW. And hopefully I will see some you guys at the Brooklyn Bowl Party in Austin.

So, I am headed to Austin, TX tomorrow to cover something like my 14th South By Southwest in a row so I wanted to get some stuff up before I left. I think I am gonna try and get one more post up before I leave because my flight isn’t until 6pm but if I don’t here’s fair warning that I might not update the site much until I get back.

As I continue to slowly crawl through every photo I have ever taken we have reached the end of 2013 and I bring you another Best Of update. I have now gone through every single digital photo I have taken since I got my very first digital camera in 2001 up to December 31st 2013. The good news is that since 2013 I have been way more organized so 2014-present should go a lot faster. 2013 was also the last year before my life completely fell apart in April of 2014 so I was working my ass off and there’s a ton of stuff for you to look at here.

Let’s give you guys a little run down of some of the highlights of 2013. Since I am headed to SXSW tomorrow that seems like a good place to start. I got to shoot SXSW Film portraits for the LA Weekly & Village Voice. I always loved doing this and my favorite shot that year was of Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr. for the movie Short Term 12. The picture got even better when Brie won a Oscar a few years later. I also got a really fun group portrait for the launch of the YouTube channel JASH featuring Sarah Silverman, Tim & Eric, Michael Cera and Reggie Watts. I had the opportunity to meet Paul Walker before he died and talked cameras with him which was surprisingly cool. After the Film Fest ended I covered a big week long party for Sailor Jerry and got some really fun stuff as well.

In 2013 I got to cover some other really stuff like the Indy 500, Hannibal Buress’ 30th birthday party,  Friday the 13th tattoo fest in Dallas and another music festival in Austin, Fun Fun Fun. Fun Fun Fun is probably my favorite festival of the year and I got to see Flag and Body Count and Sparks and a bunch of other stuff I actually wanted to see. I covered my usual stuff too like the AVN Awards, Gathering of the Juggalos and Fool’s Gold Day Off where I shot some great stuff of Migos before they took over the world.

I obviously shot a ton of babes as well. I started shooting for Hustler in 2013 and shot some great stuff of Stoya and Charlotte Stokely for them. I also shot some hilarious portraits of Chuck Palahniuk in a sex shop. But more importantly than all of that was my Route 66 trip that started out as a small Kickstarter to pay for some of the trip, to a 31 day adventure that ended up as my first book, a web series, and my first LA solo art show. That trip and the resulting book was a big life highlight.

Okay, I am gonna stop talking now and pack for Texas. Enjoy the gallery.

Click here to to see the HUGE gallery of my best digital photos from 2013!

On Friday night I stopped by Three Kings Tattoo in Greenpoint to check out the art benefit they were doing for Warriors Fund. The Warriors Fund is a charity set up to raise money for the Wounded Knee School District in South Dakota. The money goes to “stock the school’s food pantry and fund specialized counselor training for suicide prevention”. You can read more about the artists involved, the charity and what it does here.

A bunch of great tattooers had art in the show and the event was packed pretty much all night despite the storm. I am not sure how much they raised but I know a ton of the art sold and people were buying raffle tickets all night. I had a ton of fun and I also am getting a tattoo out of the deal so I am pretty psyched about that. Great event all around. Thanks for having me out!

Click here to see all the photos from the Warriors Fund art benefit at Three Kings Tattoo.

Driven By Boredom anniversary week is coming to a close with photos of Riley Nixon and her adorable puppy Pig! It’s crazy that I managed to lose these photos of Riley and Pig because they are pretty great. Not in any skilled photographic way, but in the way that Riley is fucking incredible and her dog is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen and I of course mean that in the best way.

Riley also helped me a ton with the Instaxxx book release party in LA. She hung out topless at the party taking photos with people and signing books and all that fun stuff. You can actually get a copy of Instaxxx signed by her and a ton of the other girls at the party here. They aren’t cheap but they are signed by a bunch of porn stars and I made my own Certificate of Authenticity which is really dumb in the best way.  I should mention that Pig is also in the book because how could he not be?

Speaking of trying to sell you things, there are a bunch of extra dirty photos of Riley on Girls of Driven By Boredom. These photos have been on there in high resolution for a couple of days. Sign up for that shit already. I’m not asking for much… Oh, and I made another t-shirt with naked girls on it. I actually took this photo the same week as these Riley photos.

What else? Since this is the last day of anniversary week I should remind you that I wrote a way too long history of Driven By Boredom that you can read over on Medium if you didn’t catch it yesterday. Oh, and I am shooting an art opening at Three Kings in Greenpoint tonight if anyone wants to come. I will have photos up this weekend, you should be in them.

In conclusion, Riley rules, Pig is cute, buy some shit, happy 17th birthday to my website and I’m out.

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of Riley Nixon & her puppy Pig.

I had something planned for today but it didn’t work out. Such is life. But the site turns 17 today and I told you guys I was going to do a post so here it is. I figured I could tell you a story about the history of Driven By Boredom.

Before Driven By Boredom was a website it was a motto. I hated being bored and have always needed to be doing something with my spare time. When I was 14 I started a music magazine and when I was 15 I started a record label and then I started taking photos of punk bands for the label and the magazine and punk rock was my entire life. Around my senior year in high school my partner in the magazine and label quit and I didn’t have something to consume my life with anymore. But around that time I also started fucking around with web design.

It was the late 90’s and I had been on the internet since 1992 or something like that. I was a kiddie hacker and for that era I was fairly knowledgeable when it came to tech but it wasn’t until my sophomore or junior when I started my first Geocities site. By the time I was a senior I knew basic HTML and had made a couple little websites and would check the hit counters every day and was blown away when a handful of people would check out my site in a given week.

I went to Penn State University in 1999 and realized immediately I had made a huge mistake. I wanted to run a record label for a living so I was a business major but before I even took my first class I said fuck it and became a photography major. Punk rock was all about DIY and I figured if I was a photo major I could take it easy and figure out the music shit in my free time. The problem was Penn State had no punk scene.

I quickly became good friends with my Penn State roommate but outside of him and a couple other people I didn’t really have any friends. I was a punk kid and I didn’t drunk and I didn’t exactly fit in at a giant party school in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time talking to my friends online and meeting new people on the internet, but one day I decided to ride the Loop Bus around campus on a Friday night and it changed my life forever.

The Loop Bus was a free bus that drove around campus from about the time classes started until bars closed at night. During the day it was a way for people to get to class or to get downtown but on Friday and Saturday night it became a way for people to get to bars and parties without having to drive a car.  It was affectionately called “The Drunk Bus” and it was always a complete fucking shit show.

So one night I am with my roommate and a few people and we are trying to figure out what we should do. We didn’t know of any parties and it was way too fucking cold to do much anyway, so I had this idea that we should just ride the drunk bus around. For some inexplicable reason I grabbed this stuffed animal monkey that a girlfriend had given me and we rode around the bus. Before one loop around campus was over I had been approached by a half dozen girls wanting to talk about my monkey and suddenly I had an idea.

The next weekend I went back on the bus. I was by myself this time but I had the monkey and a camera. If anyone talked to me about the monkey I would take their photo with it. I spent a few hours Friday and Saturday taking photos and on Sunday I dropped the film off to get developed. On Monday I picked up the film and started working on a website. A few days later “The Loop Monkey” was born.

Almost instantly the site became a hit. Hundreds of people were visiting the site every day to look for their photos and the photos of their friends. The school newspaper even did a front page story on me. I was getting stopped five times a day by people wanting to talk to me. The problem was that I hated that. I quickly realized I was not cut out for being famous, even on that micro level. I would have someone try and talk to me at 8am and I would kinda blow them off and by the time I got home from class they would have written some post about how awful I was on my message board. The head of the bus company found out about me and had the bus drivers kick me off after one lap around campus. It became a whole thing. I decided to quit and a few months after it started the Loop Monkey was no more.

I wanted to drop out of school but my parents convinced me to give it one more year. The problem was that by the time they convinced me to go back all the dorms were filled up. I got stuck in temporary housing in a study hall with seven other roommates. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend (she cheated on me with my first girlfriend and a random dude the day before I left for college!) and I was depressed as hell. My old roommate and his friends moved off campus together so I spent a lot of time in my room.

I started all these dumb projects to keep myself entertained. I was doing photography still and I was making really terrible electronic music with early EDM programs like ACID and Fruity Loops. I didn’t even like electronic music but it was fun to do. I had some terrible site on Mp3.com. I started making these really absurd videos with my roomates where we would lip sync to 80’s pop songs and record these mini music videos using the super early webcam I owned. I started making prank listings on eBay just to entertain myself and my friends.

When I say friends I am of course talking about my friends back home, but I was also talking about my new online friends. There was a scene of people popping up making these websites about their lives. Blog wasn’t a word back then and LiveJournal wasn’t really popular yet. It was mostly just nerds in their parents basement making these sites that were a collection of everything they thought was cool on the internet and nonsense about their lives. The sites were called Everything/Nothing because they were about everything and nothing at all. E/N was also used to talk shit about the sites saying they meant everything to the author but nothing to everyone else.

At some point I got sick of having to email my photos and videos to people and decided I needed to start my own E/N site. YouTube didn’t exist back then and there weren’t many options for sharing photos with people. I wanted to put all my dumb projects in one place so that everyone could see them. I didn’t want to use Geocities or Tripod or any of the other hosting sites back then because I wanted to host all my own content. Fortunately I had friends in the E/N scene running their own servers and I got some space on a friend’s server and bought my first domain name. I bought drivenbyboredom.com because this was going to be central home for all the projects that I created when I was trying not to lose my mind from boredom.

Building the site took months. I did a lot of the HTML by hand but I also used a program called Microsoft Front page. Everyone at Penn State got a bunch of the Microsoft Office type products and Front Page was the web design program. I wasn’t great at it, but I built a separate page for all of my projects. I built a webcam portal into the main page that would refresh every 30 seconds with a new photo if I was online. I built a journal into the site so I could tell people when there would be new updates to the different sections. And most importantly I built a links page.

These days there’s way too much shit on the internet, but back then finding quality content was hard and the way you would do it was by going to a site like mine to find out about other cool sites. I went on mIRC and asked all the webmasters I knew if they would link me and I got a couple girls I knew to pose topless with popular websites written on their skin. I knew how to get people naked and topless fan signs were a prized internet currency back then. By the time Driven By Boredom was ready to launch I had a dozen sites ready to tell everyone about me.

On March 1st, 2001, Driven By Boredom launched…..

If you want to read the rest of the story check out The History Of Driven By Boredom over on Medium. 

Here’s now some random old DBB related shit to make this post look prettier.

Third straight update this week for Driven By Boredom anniversary week. We turn 17 tomorrow!

Today we got a bunch of photos of Daisy Ducati who I met in Vegas years ago and finally got to photograph in LA.

I had rented a compact car but of course when I went to get it the rental car company decided to give me a giant SUV. They actually tried to charge me more for it, but I yelled a bunch and they gave me this massive thing. I figured since I had this huge car I would use it as a location and I shot Daisy in the parking lot of my hotel. It was pretty funny because people kept walking by while we were doing it but the windows were slightly tinted so I’m not sure anyone noticed.

Daisy’s boyfriend was with her and he was driving one of those new Dodge Challengers or Chargers and I was talking to him about it and because he is the most aggressively nice person I’ve ever met he tried to let me take his car for the week while he drove this giant SUV. I told him I appreciated it but I didn’t really want to put him out like that. Fortunately I didn’t take him up on it because two days later I was meeting up with a friend and when I opened the door to get out a woman speeding around a turn crashed right into my door. If it had been a second later I would have been dead. Amazingly in California they have some bullshit law where if you run into a door it’s somehow the door’s fault and my insurance had to pay for the accident, but shout out to my AmEx for the assist.

Anyway, I just told you that story to fill space, I doubt most of you read this shit anyway but it’s time to look at these photos! Oh, and on a promotional note there are a handful of extra bonus photos of Daisy on Girls of Driven By Boredom and the set that I am posting on Friday is already up there if you want a sneak peak!

Now, click here to see all the photos of Daisy Ducati in my absurdly large rental car!

In my last update I talked about how I had three girl gallery updates for you this week, but I also mentioned I had finished going through every photo I took in 2012. I also looked at my calendar and realized that Thursday is March 1st, which means that my website is turning 17 this week. In celebration I decided to do a post every day this week. We have the three girl galleries on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but we also will have an anniversary post on Thursday and I decided that today would be the perfect day to put up a gallery of my favorite photos from 2012.

I have done galleries like this before. Here are links to the best of 2009, the best of 2010 and the best of 2011. Hopefully the best of 2013 will be coming soon as well. So far I’ve made it to to June. This one should be pretty good.

2012 was an interesting year. It was sort of a turning point in my career. I was still shooting a ton of nightlife but I was dating someone who lived in LA so I was out there a lot shooting naked women and things like that. I did my first solo photo show in 2012 and I shot my first Village Voice cover. I had some pretty cool opportunities shooting movie posters for Red Flag and The Yes Men Are Revolting and I had a ton of fun shooting music festivals like SXSW, Pitchfork and Musink.

2012 also had some disappointments. The second Vice Dos and Don’ts book came out and I had more than 70 photos in the book but they somehow forgot to credit me. They were really apologetic and I basically came up with an agreement with them that they would start letting me shoot actual documentary work for them. I ended up going to Puerto Rico to do a story on cockfighting. It’s probably some of the best work I have ever done but when I got home my editor had vanished. I don’t want to say too much but not only did the story never get published but I also didn’t end up shooting anything for Vice again for several years.

I also got to do a story on Hurricane Sandy for Gawker. I went with a Gawker writer to Breezy Point and Rockaway Beach and looked at the devastation and recovery effort after the storm. It was and incredible, heartbreaking trip and I came back with some work that I was really proud of. Unfortunately right around that a certain sex tape was published that ultimately led to the end of Gakwer as a website. My editor left shortly after and the work was never published (amazingly I finally got paid for it in 2016!)

I did some other proper journalism in 2012 as well. During Hurricane Sandy I actually walked over the Williamsburg Bridge and photographed a flooded Lower East Side in the middle of the storm. I covered the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, took a bunch of photos at the NFL Draft and went to both the Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest AND the after party.  I covered a bunch of conventions including NYC Comic Con, a couple tattoo conventions, Exxxotica Chicago and of course the Adult Entertainment Expo.

I shot a bunch of “celebrity” stuff in 2012. I shot celebrity portraits at SXSW, I photographed Hannibal Buress’ 30th birthday party for him, I photographed backstage at the MTV Woodie Awards and I spent the day shooting Donald Glover when Childish Gambino played the Brooklyn Bandshell. I got to shoot Alec Baldwin doing stuff twice for NYU and I photographed that dude from that band Orgy hanging out in a playground.

I am gonna stop now but shout out to Sailor Jerry and the Village Voice who were by far my best clients back then and I should of course mention that there’s a ton of NSFW stuff in this gallery. I shot a TON of porn stars in 2012 including this great shoot with my girlfriend at the Salton Sea, the first time I ever shot my pal Lily LaBeau and one of my favorite shoots ever with Dana DeArmond. Okay, seriously I am gonna wrap this up now, but did I mention that the Voice made me photograph One Direction? Hilarious.

Click here to see all my best photos from 2012!

PS. I should mention that there are no photos from the 2012 Gathering of the Juggalos because I am working on a juggalo book so all those photos ended up in their own folder and I forgot to add them to this gallery.