Kat Malott at Wall Street Journal (who is going to get buried under macaroons for this one) got me an hour with John Waters at his apartment in NYC. The assignment was environmental portraits for the real estate section.

 But I arrived with this idea to mirror 1926 Man Ray photo “Noire et blanche (Black and white)” of a model, posing with a carved mask. 

Breaking out the black seamless at the end of the shoot, I explained my idea in my best broken English. He smiled and replied, “Alright, take your best shot, Diane Arbus.” 

He rested his head for few seconds, 7 frames total, and I was in a very, very good mood for a good couple of hours.

I went to Princeton NJ a few weeks ago to portray Robert George who talked to Alexandra Wolfe about the solitude of being a conservative intellectual under Donald Trump…

Here is how it looked in the paper

Last year, The in-flight magazine of Norwegian Airlines sent me to a funny place. Up in East Harlem, in a huge warehouse, the department of sanitation is keeping the treasures found in the trash of NY.

It’s actually the life work of Nelson Molina, who obsessionally collected what they call “mongos” in the sanitation slang, during his 32 years of service.

The visit was very regulated, I only had 30 minutes with no assistant and it took a little negotiation, and signing a few forms, before I could use my beloved Qflash. Here are a few out-takes.

After spending a fair amount of time prostrated in front of CNN, missing both my wife and democracy, I finally crawled out of Bushwick a couple of weeks ago to portray designer Christian Siriano at his showroom.

I photographed designers John Varvatos and Paul Andrews at their respective studios, for the annual Achievement awards issue of Footwear news.

On a side note, I will be operating from Sweden for all of December till early January. Holler at me if you need a scandinavian portrait!

A couple of outtakes of a very last-minute shoot with filmmaker and youtube personality Casey Neistat at his Lower-Manhattan studio as Adweek named him Digital Creator of the year in their new Hot List issue.

Believe it or not, but he has a crowd of rabid teenager fans waiting outside his studio everyday, to the point we could not actually shoot outside.

David Saltzman was the Executive director of the Robin Hood Foundation for 27 years. He is much much nicer than I made him look but i like that shot. 

Here is how it looked in the journal. Read his profile by Alexandra Wolfe here.

These past few years, I have been illustrating Alexandra Wolfe’s Weekend Confidential column for The Wall Street Journal regularly. The frequent readers of this blog, mostly close friends and family members, might remember the “Unstoppable” Alex from our adventures with Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz or well… Sarah Palin.

And for the past few years, every time I saw Alex, I always wanted to ask her to organize me a sitting with her dad, but, you know, i didn’t want to be that guy…

Last monday however, I spent my afternoon in Tom Wolfe’s beautiful living room, overlooking Central Park, with my beloved Ronnie ‘Boo Boo’ Weil, as Alexandra was assigned the daunting task of interviewing her own dad. It’s very good. Read it here!

P.S: Alexandra, your dad is awesome. I hope you like the portrait.

P.P.S: We are both a little bit worried that you’re going to Burning man.

I got to spend a few minutes with Salman Rushdie a couple of weeks ago for french magazine Le Point; which translates literally as The Point.

If you read french, the interview by Michel Schneider is great.

Read the interview here.