Out of Town grew from several different things I was pursuing in early 2009. On January 1, I started a self-portrait-a-day exercise; it’s a great way to be mindful of practicing photographing/artmaking daily, and teach yourself to push beyond the perfunctory shot and really, truly see. I was also on my first “tour” of photographing at auto shows, and everything was so new – like anyone whose camera is an extension of their arm, there was that strong compulsion to document every new thing I faced along the way.

January 2009, I found myself in a stark, empty downtown Detroit, -10* outside, in a hotel that had opened two weeks earlier. Still new to the client’s team, I was as yet a bit of an outsider and had a lot of free time to myself outside of my freelance duties. As I sat in my huge room watching Law & Order on tv, bored out of my skull, and not satisfied with the half-hearted self-portrait I had already taken to fulfill the daily series, my mind started to wander. Most likely, I was the first person to ever stay in this hotel room. And what do people do in hotel rooms? Sleep, eat, work, have sex, watch Law & Order – then my mind wandered to the macabre. Sometimes things go wrong in hotel rooms. Sometimes people get dead in hotel rooms. Wouldn’t it be funny if… and I started laughing to myself. Wouldn’t it be funny if I took pictures of myself as if I were dead in this perfectly staged room? So I pulled out my dSLR and did it. Staged several “murder scenes.” No blood, no gore, just snippets of “What’s going on there?”

As I traveled to other cities after Detroit, I eagerly anticipated entering every new pristine, orderly hotel room. Every room contained new possibilities. Not always for my fake deaths, but observing the staging, sitting where I’m not supposed to be, inserting myself in the perfectly placed pillows, or catching compositions out of the corner of my eye reflected in mirrors.

And so in January 2012, three years after embarking on a journey of self-portraits and auto shows, twenty of these photographs amazingly ended up in a university gallery in Chicago. What next? Keep pushing? End the series? Are they getting repetitive or stupid? I don’t know. What I do know is that the next time I arrive in another hotel room, it’s inevitable that I will sit, relax, watch tv, and suddenly jump up laughing to myself, set the timer on my camera, and run in front of it until I get a shot that makes my inner Edward Gorey well pleased.

Sunday afternoon, I am going over the “The Gallery” at the MGM Grand to see the luxury  cars, including a McLaren MP4-12C in the supercar line-up of the usual suspects. Sunday evening kicks of with the Cadillac ATS, and the media frenzy begins Monday morning.

If you need photos from NAIAS, I will be making the photographs that I shoot outside of my reporting duties available for sale online at SmugMug.com, an easy-to-use website similar to flickr. The shots, once uploaded, will be organized under “NAIAS 2012 – [Automaker]“, and an entire gallery of a particular car can be purchased, or individual images can be purchased a la carte. All of the image rights are taken care of on the SmugMug website during purchase process at the following URL:

http://ponycargirl.smugmug.com/

Should you need to purchase a photograph of a particular car and don’t see it – or want to be sure that I get the shot you need – shoot me an email and I will do my best to get it for you.

I’m still working on a few galleries of personal work that will be updated very soon. As I was editing shots tonight, I came upon this photo of a Packard that I took at the Scarsdale Concourse d’Elegance. I used a Holga panoramic pinhole camera on 120 Tri-X.

Please, Kodak, don’t go away. A true classic (Tri-X) will die with you.