The first in a trio of images of people sleeping in public places. I’m always amazed at the places people can sleep. I can’t sleep on an airplane. I have trouble sleeping in a car if someone else is driving whereas if I’m driving I feel like I could fall asleep at any given moment ironically enough–strange that now that I say it out loud but it’s absolutely the truth.
Hotels and I are no better. I’ll spend a night in a hotel room staring at the ceiling wishing I was in my own bed. I can never get comfortable, the pillows are always to stiff or the mattress is to soft or the sheets are to scratchy. I actually slept once on a train en route from Venice to Milan. When I woke up someone had stolen my mobile phone, my wallet, all my cash (which wasn’t in my wallet) and a giant chocolate bar I had eaten half off. The thief had been kind enough to leave my passport and the bag of carrots I had been snacking on. I understand the carrots but the passport was a bit of a surprise. Regardless I’ll never do that again. Fuck sleeping on trains.
Sleepers | Skateboard shot on my Leica M7 with the 35mm Summicron on Kodak Tri-X 400 +1.
The girl on the other side of the glass is my daughter, Ester. I was inside and she was outside with Ella goofing around. I think they were looking for me when I made this image. She stuck her face right up against the circular cut in the frosted glass, looking around. She didn’t need me just wanted to know where I was. She’s pulling away from me because she’s at the age where she needs to learn to pull away.
The thing that everyone tells you when you first become a parent is to enjoy it because it goes so fast. I must have heard it from a million different parents with older kids, from own my parents and from pretty much everyone else.
“Enjoy the time while they’re so small,” “Cherish every moment,” “Before you know it they’ll be big”
And the thing is you don’t really listen. It’s all so new and so incredible and so tiring that you forget. You’re totally caught it the moment. You forget to notice because of how incredible it all is and how fast it’s all going. Then one day you’re at LACMA with your daughters and you realize that they’re both in middle school, that they’d rather run around by themselves then hang with their pop, and that all this happened in what feels like the time it takes to make three school lunches.
Then something else creeps in around the edges–you’re afraid of what happens next. Excited but afraid and sad but happy because it’s all happening at the speed of light. The weeks pass like hours and years like weeks. You can’t slow it down and I so wish I could.
The girl on the other side of the glass, shot on Leica M7, Summicron 35 on Kodak Tri-X 400 +1.
My earliest memory of Tom Petty was seeing the video for “Free Falling” in the summer of 1989. Guess that makes me 14, with long bangs in my eyes, dressed all in black and wearing vision street wear. Skateboarding was our lives–my brother Dave and me. When we saw that girl skating in the video it was a lightning bolt to the brain. I’m pretty sure Dave bought the CD or the tape or the record or whatever that week. All I can remember is that it was always on. There was a period of our lives when we knew every word to every song pretty much backwards and forwards. The future was wide open.
Since then I’ve gone back and listened to his earlier work at the same time as following his later endeavors and as much as I’ve come to love the other albums nothing ever comes close to that feeling I get when I put on “Full Moon Fever.” It’s not just the memories that come flooding back of that point in my life–it’s the music itself. It’s electric and smart and real and raw and insightful. There are these moments when Tom just howls at a point in a song or punctuates a chorus with a loud “hey”. I always felt chills and still do… even now as I write this the hairs are standing up on the back of neck and it’s breaking my heart.
He played here in Los Angeles last week. I wish I had gone to see him. So dumb to say “If I had only known” but that’s how I feel. I wish I had known, because I would have gone but now he’s dead. I thought all day about what I could possibly say to give thanks and tribute to a man I never knew and who never knew me but who all the same feels like he played such an important part of my life at such an important time. Don’t think there are really words.
Free fall out into nothing, leave this world for a while. Leica M7, Kodak Tri-X 400 +1
