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featured collection:
(click on the image below to view all the photographs from the collection)
this thing called
passiontolive
PassionToLive came to life in 1999 after a trip to visit my mistress, NYC. I had been away from its energy for too long and away from the creative world for a number of years due to my other work. After getting back to DC, I set about creating something that would celebrate all that is good in life. The things that make you wake up excited for what the day may hold. It could be reading a new book, traveling halfway around the world, roaring down the road in a new car, listening to music or simply having a conversation. The experiences that make this incredible thing called life worth living. Quite simply, passion. Ive always been blessed to be surrounded by many of the people who bring these things into the world and decided to design PassionToLive to celebrate all they do.Photography was really just a sidepiece to the original concept. While I had been shooting off and on for nearly 10 years at that point, I would quickly correct anyone that attempted to call me a photographer. Much of this derived from two painful initial forays into photography. The first was when I managed to get photo passes to shoot a Depeche Mode concert in the early nineties and not using a camera I was familiar with rather skillfully stripped every single roll of film off their rolls and lost every image. The second, using the same dreaded camera, happened during a Jane's Addiction concert when Perry Farrell walked off stage after the first couple songs and left. Needless to say the crowd was not pleased and stormed out into the streets to surround the departing tour bus, which of course unbeknownst to them, was for the opening band and not Jane's. Despite media reporting of a riot, it remained relatively peaceful until the cops arrived in full riot gear and began beating down the concertgoers. I was the only photographer there to capture it and you guessed it, I stripped every role once again. Reeling from the impact of these moments on my photography career I became an occasional amateur and spent more time arranging and managing photographers for my magazines then I did shooting myself.With an eye more towards community than any real photography, PassionToLive continued to grow and develop a reputation within the international club scene and creative communities around the world running through to early 2001. All of this came to a crashing halt on the morning of 11 September 2001. As my other work became all-consuming, I barely even managed to remember it was there. Despite being frozen in time for two years with no new content or attention, the site still got hundreds of visitors every day and somehow managed to hold people's interest.Racing towards burnout in my other career, I picked up a new camera in September 2003, either consciously or sub-consciously, to try and find balance again. Not only did I find balance, I also found my eye. Some 16 months and 50,000 pictures later, PassionToLive evolved into something I could have never predicted. The core concept of PassionToLive, that passion for living, for creativity, new experiences in life and living every minute to its absolute fullest, became intertwined with my photographic vision.PassionToLive today is a visual celebration of all of those amazing, incredible things but beyond that it is also a kind of undefined, informal community of people that share that same drive and passion. It is because of those people that the images you see on PassionToLive exist. Without the trust and generosity of those people to let me shoot them, I would never be able to realize the visions that I've got bouncing around in my head. I say to all of you who have already given me the opportunity to capture those moments and to all of you who I have yet to meet, quite simply, thank you.The images. Ahhhh, the images. I always have to laugh because so many people come up to me after I shoot where they work or where they had a party and in a rather surprised tone always comment that the place in the picture couldn't possibly be where they were. I assure you it is. All of the lights and effects you see in my nightlife shots are truly there. Only the most basic of tweaking is done in Photoshop afterwards and then often nothing more than brightness and contrast adjustments. For the most part the images are as shot. The exception to this is my studio work where I take great liberties with playing with the color and effects in Photoshop.I've spent a lot of time thinking about how two people can look at the same moment and see radically different things. While you can't actually experience the moment as the other person does, photography gives you a fascinating opportunity to at least get an idea of the other person's point-of-view. The images I shoot are as I see things. It's a small window into my perspective, for better or worse. Those details or moments are the things that I have always found so amazing. While I can assure you I don't see crazy blurs of light, I do see, or perhaps a better word is feel, the atmosphere that I attempt to capture in the images. In other words, I'm not trying to stage the event but rather freeze in a moment the feeling and ambience that is in the air.This brings me to another point about the types of subjects and shots I do. While I am certainly not one to oppose an amazingly beautiful shot in the stereotypical sense, it's not what really captivates me. I'm much more interested in the shot that's beautiful because of the energy that emanates from it or what it reveals, even if that is something dark. There is a unique and piercing beauty in the raw and pure. The perception of that beauty is also a very individual thing. I have a wall in my house with about 200 of my prints on it. One of my favorite things to do is to watch peoples reactions as they make their way along the wall. Every person triggers on something different. One person will be floored by one image and another person not so much. However, when that person looks just to the side, there is one that they connect to. The individuality and diversity of opinion people have to the work is one of the things I find so rewarding about it. If I reach the point where everyone likes every image, I think I'll have to take a serious look at what I'm doing and find a way to push the edge harder. Fortunately, I believe I'm quite far from that point in time.Many people have been asking if I do shoots for hire. The promise I made myself when I picked up that new camera and began shooting was that the moment I lose the passion for this or find myself shooting something I'm not artistically involved in, then it's the moment I stop. Translation, if I'm into the concept, I'm there. If I'm not into the concept, no amount of money is going to interest me and quite frankly you would get better results hiring someone that's into what you're trying to accomplish. The biggest issue for me and every creatively cursed person I know is time. So many ideas, so many things to do and so damn few hours in a day.Before I close off, my work is as much a byproduct of the environment I'm in and what I'm exposed to as anything. Those influences run an eclectic mix but without any diminishment to those not listed here, I would be remiss if I didn't mention these few: William Gibson (author, Neuromancer), Ron Fricke (director, Baraka), Michael Mann (director, Heat) Akira Kurosawa (director, Ran), Gaspar Noe (director, Irreversible), Dead Can Dance and Lisa Gerards solo work (music), the incredible Cirque du Soleil family, the Buddha Bar series, Trent Reznor (music), Chuck Palahniuk (author, Survivor), Godfrey Reggio (director, the Qatsi trilogy), Eiji Yoshikawa (author, Musashi), Orson Scott Card (author, Ender's Game) and Sigur Ros (music).thank youlaugh smile enjoy,- ben [email protected] http://www.passiontolive.com
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