2001

This photo was taken almost three months after 9/11 when we New Yorkers were still reeling and life felt very dark in the city. I was living in the West Village at the time and prior to 9/11, the Twin Towers had been a prominent sight from my corner when I turned my head to look south down 7th Avenue. The morning of September 11th, I was standing on that same corner and saw the outline of a plane in the North Tower – it was immediately after it had crashed into the building, before it had started burning. After the towers went down, the ground zero “pile” continued to burn for another 99 days. During those three-plus months, from my apartment and my neighborhood, there was still a constant acrid burning smell I couldn’t escape – rubber and other chemicals still smoldering months later.

On one hand, I had no holiday oomph at all and I didn’t feel like making a card attempting to wish anyone “Happy” anything. And on the other hand, there was this idea that life must go on (or the terrorists would have won). And I wanted to keep my yearly streak going. So in conceiving this card, I wanted it to somehow reflect the sadness, the edginess, the anguish of that time – and also the glimmers of hope that were there too. Right after 9/11, American flags could suddenly be seen displayed in store windows all over New York City - prior to that, this was not a common sight in the city - and I wanted to incorporate that as well.

Why a tattoo parlor? I’m not sure except it somehow reflected a bad-assery of the time. Tattooing was actually illegal in New York City until 1997 – just four years prior. At that time, I hardly knew anyone with a tattoo and if someone did have one, they had to find their tattoo artist by word of mouth and were seen as risking getting Hepatitis anytime they got one. Tattoos were the realm of punk rockers, heavy metal-ers, bikers (as in motorcycles), the military, prison, gangs or the Hells Angels. There was an idea that if your tattoo showed on your arm or hand, you might not be able to get a job. Tattooing was definitely not mainstream as it is today. There was a lawlessness about it back then (since it had literally been illegal) and a dark underground worldliness about it – at least for me. If you got a tattoo, you were risking something. Personally, I had been intrigued by tattoos and people who got them. I could never have decided what to get and I admired those who had the conviction to put something on their skin they can never take off.

I don’t remember how I found this particular tattoo parlor, although in 2001, there still were very few tattoo parlors around so it took some looking. I’m sure I did my usual process – which was to scout possible locations and then go in with my portfolio of cards past and ask if they would play along. I remember being rejected by at least one tattoo artist. After years of being underground, they still weren’t so keen to be photographed.

This was shot in a tattoo parlor on Stanton Street called New York Hardcore Tattoos and the tattoo artist is Franky White. For my costume, I went to Trash and Vaudeville for inspiration - it was on St Mark's Place at the time and was known for its punk and rock-and-roll fashion. I then assembled my finest biker-chic outfit – fake leather pants, a fake leather top, fake piercings for my nose and lip and a black wig. I painted my nails black and bought loads of temporary tattoos (from Temptu) and put them on. The morning of the shoot, I hand-drew, with a Sharpie, the Happy Holidays “tattoo” on my left arm and then Franky pretended to be finishing it.

Often the vision of what I want the scene to be does not match what we actually capture on camera. This inevitably resulted in me calling Geoff immediately after I picked up the developed film and saw the images and insisting to Geoff that we have to reshoot, that what we got is terrible, that it is not what I’d imagined, and on and on. I remember for this particular year, I was even more adamant that this time we REALLY needed to reshoot. He humored me and ignored my pleas as usual. It takes a good amount of time for the scene I’d envisioned capturing on film to fade enough from my mind so that I stop comparing what we got with what I’d imagined, and can finally see the actual image for what it is on its own. That’s probably true in life too. Now, ironically, in retrospect, this is one of my favorite cards.