I worked as a commercial photographer in the early to mid-90’s in Los Angeles and rented a 4000 square foot natural light studio at the corner Santa Monica Blvd and Highland Ave (which I subleted under the name “Daylight Studios”). About four months prior to leaving the space and moving to New York, I developed a connection to a homeless young man named Scott. Scott had been sleeping in a car body without wheels that had been left in the studio parking lot, by another tenant.  Though a longer story, the short of it is this: I invited Scott to live in my studio for the final month of my lease.  I locked up my belongings and valuable equipment in a single room, leaving him with the full run of the place. This included a kitchen, a loft for sleeping, two bathrooms, and a shower.  After laying down some rules, I entrusted him with a key.  Over the course of the time that he was there, he would occasionally ask if another person or two could share the space and indeed, over the course of the month, the roster grew. The studio had become a small temporary shelter. 

Throughout the course of that month, Scott and I began to imagine ways that we could collaboratively produce some images.  I suggested that we attempt to stage some iconic scenes from the history of painting. Looking through some books in the studio, we selected a few images as possible candidates: Gericault’s Raft Of The Medusa, Hans Holbein’s, Dead Christ In The Tomb, and others.  Scott was excited by the challenge I had put before him: cast the characters, find the costumes, scavenge for and/or build the props. 

The following day, Scott and few others arrived at the studio with a pile of scrap wood, some of which had handpainted geometric pattern on several of the planks (a relic of some local architectural history that had been trashed in a renovation).  After a few hours of cutting and nailing, we had built a coffin or “tomb” roughly the dimensions of that which are seen in the Holbein painting.  Several days later, we would shoot the image using a homeless subject named Richard, that Scott himself cast. A make-up artist friend who came in to create seeming wounds on Richard’s hands, feet, forehead and side. Just before the shoot, I brought in recently published Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Time For Sacrifice Clinton Says,” which seemed to have an interesting relationship to the overall subject matter.

Six other staged pictures resulted from our month-long collaboration. Each photo shoot was followed by a pizza party and very often live music (as several of the men and women that were sheltering there were musicians). The staged pictures that happened during my last month in Daylight Studio seemed a poignant end to a chapter of an LA-based life in fashion and entertainment commercial photography), and also an important new beginning for me.