In Tricycle Magazine

My photographs of gasoline explosions have been getting a lot of attention lately, and I'm always eager for someone to put them to creative use. Tricycle Magazine has used them to illustrate an article about monks and self-immolation. I think it's a pitch-perfect use of my images, because they are both beautiful and violent, and because an abstract image is so much better than a literal one to illustrate such a fraught topic.

The article describes the long history of the act of self-immolation, and is surprising. Preview it at Tricycle.com.

Lucky 13

The inspiration for this one is classic bad luck - very rocker.

I sketched designs for all of the photos, but this is the only one I have left.

The head is the centerpiece of this photo, and really important. I found an artist, Sarina Brewer, a sort rogue taxidermists, who got what I was after, and did an amazing job. The cat looks menacing and fierce. She only works with animals that have died...

Courtney brought a broad assortment of numbers - paper, ceramic, large, small. The big paper ones were perfect, but I wanted more dimension, so I cut some new ones after tracing the paper ones.

This one has a lot more elements than the others. And the earlier versions had more than this. Simplify.

Pig Hearts and Gasoline Explosions

I've mentioned before about how I started photographing fire because I needed it as material for a photograph. This is that photograph.

The history of this symbol is much deeper and older than the others, and more directly spiritual. It's an awesome symbol, in any case, and such a tense mix of suffering and hope.

Actual barbed wire is too big for the pig heart, so I twisted up some model barbed wire, and painted it gloss black. I did an opaque blood to give it a little connection to all the illustrations through history. And the dwarf roses were another genius touch from prop stylist Courtney Walch.

Bird Wings

The inspiration.

The funny thing about bird wings is that their main purpose is to provide lift, not serve as decoration in a symbol, so they're more complicated than, uh, they need to be.

At one point, I thought the most authentic approach would be to use an actual bird. This bird was awesome.

Awesome at being a bird, maybe. Modelling, not so much. This would be great for some weird version of that german bird. He wasn't being hurt, but that didn't stop him from getting mad at, and trying to bite, his handler.

In the end, I ended up going with taxidermy wings, a glass heart, and ribbon with dry-transfer lettering on it.