Also from my shoot with Ivanka Lova. Alisa Blaginna in gold.

I worked with the amazing Ivana Lova from Chic Studios to create this look on Andrea Kelly from Empire Model Management. I looked to the runways for inspiration as colorful iridescent eyes are popping up everywhere and opulence is back from New York to Paris. Gold and rich colors are everywhere. The purple is my addition and we pushed the look as far as possible. During the research process I borrowed some colors from my boyfriend and discovered Deborah Lippmann’s color palette. We used Happy Birthday as an accent nail. The pattern for her hair is a paint splatter on metallic paper I created for another project.

Shot last night. Although I don’t think it’s making my show. I do think it’s cool and great for the blog. After three months of trying to shoot this and not finding something perfect that works. I’m moving on.

I tried to gently explain that it takes a lot of time and testing to get there, and models don’t always have the ability to control their fate; simply being “hot” is not enough.  I started working with food shortly after that conversation happened for the third time in a row, with three different doe-eyed faces. A model concerned with fame never makes good pictures, and they have yet to give me the look I need to move forward. It’s allabout the picture and I have yet to have a kiwi, pomegranate, or alligator claw be concerned with their own stardom.

That being said, I’m ready to get back to testing and creating fashion images.  Working within the photo and working with single ingredients and patterns has taught me about filters and backgrounds, sculpture and transformation.  Food is ever patient and finding the prefect subject is as simple as going to the farmers market or grocery store or taking walks in Chinatown.

When I started reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, a book about her youth and relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe – her roommate and occasional lover – I thought the process of creating work would be wholly different and unique to a bygone era.  It’s not. Creating work, finding resources and models, discovering patrons and buyers, getting a gallery  – it’s all the same.

So what’s in a picture? How is it made? How is that moment captured? It’s a lot more complicated than equipment + model = picture. I wandered through Nan Goldin’s recent show where she elevates the junkie to the level of a Botticelli at the Louvre and marveled at her documentation of drug culture. Would the images in “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” even be possible today? Everyone is so concerned with looking good for Facebook that retouching before posting is now the norm. The existential question has surfaced – if a status update get’s no “likes” has the event actually happened? Timeline has now made this social network even more editorial. Is life real, or is life based on your version of events through this strange lens?

Yet droves of young men and women pose with iPhones in suggestive stances. We see them drunk and sometimes unconscious plastered through the pages of the Internet, sporting erections and asking to be judged. None contain the glimmer of truth behind Nan’s work. When I was working on my Leslie/Lohman show I asked one of the guys reluctant to bear it all about this strange ideal. He had no qualms of being suggestive and flagrant online. “It’s just the Internet,” he responded. I mentioned that the Internet cares far less about his image and privacy. He had no reply and went back into the sea of gorgeous men posing for their cell phone cameras in mirrors.

I’m attending portfolio reviews and the high-end magazine market wants a certain kind of very glamorous image, this almost ephemeral ghostly look.

Which means that photography is becoming more and more about production and crafting the image by working in the picture. I happily went to a local bookstore to purchase Tim Walker’s book, he’s the only photographer I know who’s been so successful with crafting a set and working with texture. For the first time I feel like I could make that: construct a set, work with colors, build things.  It’s a dedication to craft, which was sparked by my recent devotion to graphic design. I just realized a photo is so much more than light, camera and subject. Rather, it’s a combination of many perfect choices and any one of them can derail the picture.  Then there is the humanity of it all; can it be produced, can it happen?

Yet how is emerging photography or production supported? I’m not sure. Overwhelmed art directors universally cry that I need better fashion, models and a higher production value in my photos. So that’s the question I need to answer as I scrounge through my sources and knock on agency doors and take rejection as well as I possibly can and try to convince people, places and talent to live in my photos.

After all, everything’s been done before. Sure we have a plethora of photographers, but there is more need for imagery. I’m also not convinced that photography has died or that the medium is no longer relevant. I think it has just changed, like everything else.

I don’t have the answers, but using certain visual references and learning how famous names of the past broke through helps. I should be less fearful when making pictures and not so overwhelmed by the need to constantly blog in order to stay relevant. Instead I should just focus on making an amazing photo as best I can and the rest will come.

I’m one print away from finishing my food show. Super excited. Above is an outtake from my jelly fish composition. I had a light table built that can hold water, I added a few drops of food color and swirled. It just got cooler from here.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck for the Ab Glider

I had a chance to work with Elisabeth Hasselbeck to make a picture for the Ab Glider. They were shooting a new commercial and I got called in for stills. She’s an insanely hard worker and I have nothing but respect for her. She laughed at my Whoopi Goldberg jokes in her Brian Atwood pumps. Like most shoots, it went into overtime and she still kept on going. She even had a better body then her double. Because of the pace of production, I only had a few minutes to create the photo above and think it’s quite spectacular, we changed the lights and set-up the reflector all while they set up for the next scene.

Start of Michael Bastian, Fall Fashion Week 2012

Shiny things, from bow ties and breastplates, are not just for the Blonds anymore. Marlon Gobel, sponsored by Swarovski did just that. Having handprints on your outfit might be a great way of flirting (DVF & Rodarte), but at any moment I expect Vidal Sassoon to rise to prominence and give us the five-pointed cut. Will a new version of The Factory begin and who’ll be our next Andy Warhol? Luxury is yawning ever so gracefully; trying to make it’s way back into a recognizable statement to differentiate the classes. Appliqué prints made to look like your grandmother’s couch are out.

Architecture has arrived from Number:Lab to Peter Som, Helmut Lang and Donna Karan to name just a few. The designs are linier asymmetrical, colorful and splotchy – we might all start to look like Frank Gehry buildings.

I was in Allan & Suzi’s shop in SoHo, strangely obsessed with their fashion library and the many important dresses for sale or rent. One stuck out, a white bondage dress with red trim from Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fall 2009 collection (style.com link). I feel like I’ve seen the same concept in many collections recently. Are we going back to 2009? Before the world stood still, are we simply trying to wash the past few years away?

In New York, we’re not seeing a lot of original design, unless you go to the playful antics of Lindsay Degen and fashion’s underground. In fact, there’s been so much unoriginality the New York Times professed this “An American Crisis of Identity”.

China seemed to be on everyone’s mind. I talked to a paper manufacturer based in the Midwest at the Max Azria party who was perplexed by the new generation’s inability to find paid work. He struggles with all the same issues everyone else does, but he’s still in business because he provides a high-end product, while the rest of his competitive set has folded.

With Target, K-Mart and H&M surviving on the licensing “Kool-Aid “of emerging designers and talent that can afford a splashy runway, there’s an even lower price point emerging in the fast fashion wars. Joe Fresh and brands in that market tier are ensuring customers never have to pay more then $100 a garment and never more then $19 a t-shirt, so the innovation that happens in the top of the market no longer occurs in America. A split has happened, the surreal axe of credit-swap-derivatives has created a very definitive wedge between the classes.

Yet we’re marching forward – even as we see the pop-up parties and supper clubs evaporate, replaced by big restaurants and actual nightclubs. Yet my hopes that the past three years would lead to a march in “new” have not occurred. We’ve simply twisted and shaped ideas of the East.

This is not fashion. This is not America.  Innovation used to start here. But as Gary Wassner pointed, while on our way to a show “every pendulum always swings back”. It’s just a question of time.