Saint Of The Month Club

Santo Chingon

Santo Chingon was only my second animated and sound-tracked saint. What the thinking was behind that I can no longer remember, but ever since then, the amount of time devoted to making these things has skyrocketed. I cast Robert who owned the now defunct coffee shop In the Black, because he was built like a Mexican Wrestler. Thanks to Isabelle for building the set and sewing the truncks.

Saint Billy

Saint Billy and some of the rest of us felt like we were having a lot of crap shoved down our throats back in 2002. Billy was the goat that lived at the end of the road in an upstate New York town called Krumville, along which you can find a little blue shack where I sometimes spend my weekends.

Saint Eli

Saint Eli took a little trip to Washington D.C. when there was still a slim hope that the madness of King George would not infect the rest of the planet. As we all know now, that was magical thinking.

Saint Lizette

Lizette is based on the pictures we see from all over the world of a grieving mother holding a picture of her deceased child. This was made at the outset of the Iraq War. Although it is only human to value the lives of your own family members and countrymen over those whom you have no immediate connection to - in the greater scheme of things, all lives are equal. Lives lost to violence have more in common than not.

Saint Brigid

Brigid is Erin, my assistant. I wanted a photo with a painterly feel. I was going for a Van Eyck look.

San Sergio

San Sergio is my homage to photo novellas, those sleazy photographed comic strips (telling tales of love, sex and crime) that have existed in Japan, Europe and Latin America but never caught on in the USA. If it wasn't so much work, I'd love to shoot a book length story in this form. Sergio, the Madman from Miami and Liz Lomax were the models. Tad Hills and Tommy made cameo appearances. More Photo Novellas here and here. A Classic is in PDF. Great site but slow loading.

Il Papa

Il Papa, AKA Eugene Henry Gosfield was born to Rudolph the furrier and Elizabeth the nurse in Chicago in 1924. He fought in WW2, fathered four kids and ran a restaurant.
He's never lost his eccentric
appreciation of the world (which sometimes borders on a sort of mad romanticism.) As a smarter man than me once said, Absolution will be yours when you accept the faults of your father as your own.

Saint Jules

Jules is the nephew of the owner of Jivamukti Yoga. He used to work the counter there and he cracked me up because he was such a sulky urban teen in the middle of that incense-wafting, waterfall-flowing and Tibetan bell environment. I wanted to cast a cynical looking kid as an altar boy. This was done at the time of the priestly abuse scandals in Boston.

Saint Rolling Hills

Saint Rolling Hills rolled in when the weather was getting nice and winter was waning. I scored the statue from my friend Indio in Bahia, Brazil. These Amer-Indians or Caboclos figures are celebrated in the Brazilian versions of Voodoo. I stripped in the face of my friend Isabelle.

Saint Antoinette

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How many great ideas have never made it to the canvas, the stage, the screen or the page because of laziness or timidity? Saint Antoinette can't get with that.