What does an oil prospector, love and being horrified have in common? They’re all part of a color photograph hat trick in the Chromatic Photography Awards 2025.
One hot spring day, actress Kaitlyn Clare and myself headed out to the low desert in California to get dirty. That is, we went out there with the idea of splattering her all over with black paint while she wore shorts, boots and black tape as pasties.
We really didn’t have any idea for the shoot until we got there and it turned into kind of a Beverly Hillbillies theme about a woman who digs for oil with her small shovel and strikes it rich. I guess I would be the Jed Clampett in the story.
The photo aptly titled, The Oil Prospector, got on Honorable Mention in the Chromatic Photography Awards 2025.
It was also a part of 50+ and Older 2025 exhibition by Las Laguna Art Gallery and a Finalist in the Mellow Yellow Art Exhibition 2024 by Ten Moir Gallery.
It was one of the images shown in an article about my work in Art Magazine, issue #3, 2025 by Barbagelata Contemporary Art Foundation.
Freedom, joy and the hope of new love after a devastating betrayal.
The theme of this shoot was reclaiming yourself after a betrayal that ends in a glorious fuck you with a woman flying free on a beautiful rock on a California beach.
c’est l’amour, was the second photo to win an Honorable Mention in the Chromatic Photography Awards 2025.
It was a Nominee in Fashion and Beauty in the World Annual Photo 2025, ReFocus Awards.
A different version of the photo was a part of the exhibitions, A Burst of Color 2025 at Decagon Gallery and Forms and Figures 2025 at Exhibizone. In the Cinematography and Photography Awards Winter 2024 it earned a Nominee in Portraits.
And the third photo to complete the hat trick (non-hockey fans will have to look it up) in the Chromatic Photography Awards 2025 is the image, Horrified B-Movie Victims.
The terrified nameless citizenry of 1950s b-movies dressed in colorful outfits are caught in horrified poses as they scream, flee and try to shoot their way out of certain death from off-screen monsters looking to squash them, natural disasters, giant crickets and alien landings.
I’ve always been intrigued by the artifice and histrionics of acting styles from old low budget sci-fi and horror b-movies. A blonde dame puts her hands up to her head and lets out a primordial scream, shaking her head in a close up as the giant lizard man approaches her. The non-stop mugging of a grimacing astronaut in a Halloween grade costume being zapped with a laser by the bug-eyed martian. The contorted facial acrobatics of the scared scientist as he battles a 2000 year old extinct dead fish that he accidentally brought back to life.
There is something about being so fake, yet totally believable in an unbelievable way that I just love.
You can read all about this photo series here.
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