The whole reason for Road Trips is to give some of you an idea about “process”. Not to suggest there are any rules about process heaven forbid. Yet seeing how someone builds a project can be helpful I think for thinking about your own work. Everyone “builds” differently and I build differently each time myself. Yet assembling the pieces of the puzzle so to speak is by its very nature painful because that is just the way it is. If there were a “formula” then that would kill the very nature of creativity. In this short video by Brandon Li you get a quick snippet of the agony and the ecstasy.

Thank you Brandon for joining us for a few days. This one is a whole lot different than your first piece from the Lucies, and points up once again that in fact going from point A to point B can never be a straight line.

I have just arrived in Paris for a meeting with my Burn Magazine team and to attend Paris Photo. Here my iPhone works again during my after dinner coffee in my favorite after dinner coffee spot and well, Paris is still Paris. What not to love.

Diego Orlando and Eva-Maria Kunz, my loyal “family” on BurnBooks are with me here in Paris. We have had a good year since producing (based on a true story) in June…in the five months since publishing our limited edition book set in Rio we are almost sold out on an ascending pricing scale, have won Best Publisher honors from the Lucie Foundation, and we are on the short list of ten top books by Aperture/Paris Photo for Best Book out of a field of 600 books submitted in 2012.

Tomorrow at Paris Photo, at the Grand Palais, our team will be signing books at the Magnum booth at 2pm. If you are in Paris please stop by to say hello. I know many of our Burn friends are around and I so look forward to seeing you again. And surely there will some time for a cold beer and our usual camaraderie. For sure the spice of life.

We are also on press right now at EBS in Italy producing a super large format “newspaper” version of (based on a true story) which we will distribute for free 2,5oo copies, half of our press run, in Rio de Janeiro to schools and art classes in the favelas. As a payback to the Rio community, where I was so kindly accepted as an outsider making photographs of the Carioca culture for both our book and for the recent essay in NatGeo. Now in Paris you can see the dummy for this new “newspaper” format.

The pleasure for me in making photographs has always had an element of payback for the people I photographed. I always want for my subjects to get as much out of being photographed as I get in making the photographs. One of the beauties of the iPhone is that you can instantly send subjects their picture. Way better than my old method of handing out Polaroids.

Twins Roberta and Renata Tavares, my friends from Rio, and key characters in (based on a true story) will be coming to Miami/Art Basel for our exhibition there in December. Roberta had joined us along with Candy Pilar Godoy in Sydney, Australia for the HeadOn Fest show of our book. So the “family” aspect is just always there for me.

For sure all in this audience are a bit more “family” I think than would normally be associated with an online blog. Surely we arm wrestle a bit in the comments section here, but that is why we are here. To share ideas about our mutual first love – the art of photography in all of its manifestations.

Join me now in Paris Photo, or in Miami/Art Basel  in December. Those of you who already know me well know this is not an idle invitation. For sure when we meet it is always special. High fives all around to this Burn audience.

-dah-

down here in the Outer Banks beach dogs rule… nobody cares what kind of car you drive as much as do you have a cool beach dog.. i mean a value system is a value system…oh i am not even in the game.. no dog .. i am a wannabe beach dog owner..you can’t always get what you want.