Onlookers

Last September I was lucky enough to be in L.A as the Space Shuttle Endeavour was being towed to its final resting place at the California Science Centre. The resulting series of work ‘ Endeavour comes home ‘ was posted on the this blog earlier this year.

I was looking though my contact sheets again and found this series of onlookers.

Hollywood

Skaters, Venice.

Venice, California. Home of the Zephyr skate team and formerly known as Dog Town… this is where skateboarding was born. Today Venice has one of the best bowls in the world and one can regularly see big name skaters ripping up this pristine and beautiful bit of concrete.

Le Monde. American Wonder.

At the end of last summer Le Magazine du Monde called us to ask if we would like to contribute to their Carte Blanche page again.

Every week Le Monde ask a different artist to contribute to Carte Blanche, the brief always being to take a picture of whatever you find stimulating at that time.

The interesting thing about their proposition was that they wanted to give me ten pages to play with, something that they have never done in the history of the magazine.

I was very complimented to be given this huge opportunity and thought it deserved a project big enough to warrant the ten pages. My idea was to cross the United States visiting as many of its iconic landscapes as possible; I wanted to show the diversity of the huge and amazing country in a very beautiful and atmospheric way.

So here is the series that emerged from our 6500 mile adventure. American Wonder.

Venice Palms

Last week we were locked away in South Bay Studios shooting a new Ford campaign for Team Detroit. It was a great experience and we produced some stunning pictures, but I have to say… I missed the sunlight !

Elk in the woods

This kind of thing never happens. We were shooting a story for Le Monde in Yellowstone national park when we saw this huge elk wondering through a burnt out forest. I moved closer thinking the elk would see me and run away but instead the elk stayed. Crouching down I waited with my Alpa…. the Elk walked straight towards camera until he was about three meters away. Even in July it was pretty cold up there at 8’000 ft, I could see the steam coming out of his mouth….and hope’d he wouldn’t charge.

There will be a small edition of prints available in various sizes.

Wild horse

Wild Horse, Monument Valley Jan 2012.

Edition of 12

34cm x44cm

21st Century Beetle

Last August we shot the the largest ever print campaign in the history of DDB for the global launch of the 21st Century Beetle. The campaign took its inspiration from  Julian Koenig’s iconic Think Small campaign of 1959 ( ranked as the best advertising campaign of the 20th century by Advertising Age ) Koenig used massive amounts of white empty space on his page and the folks at DDB UK wanted to echo the same sensibility for their new campaign… but with a more human touch. Jeremy Craigen and Grant Parker saw an image of mine (Chevelle ) where I bleached out the background whilst keeping my subject solid and up front. This served as a great foundation for the photographic style of the campaign.

In total we shot twenty one print executions in sunny Los Angeles.

Art Director, Grant Parker

Executive Creative Director , Jeremy Craigen

Production by Produceit

First Point

First Point, Malibu California. The setting for The Endless Summer and home to many a soul surfer.

This is the first in a series of work that will examine the surfers landscape as an art form as opposed to simply documenting a sport.

VW ‘It’s back’ voted Print ad of The Week in Lürzer’s Archive

It’s so great to be chosen as ‘ad of the week’ by Lürzers ! I feel like this blog is all about the Beetle campaigns at the moment though.

Having just finished nine ads in China and another forty pictures in Los angeles including the launch campaign for the new cabriolet there are plenty more to come………

AD’s Grant Parker, David
Mackersey

ECD, Jeremy Craigen

Agency, Adam and Eve / DDB