Oooooo...Dedication's What you need...

It must be five years since I last got in contact with the enigma that is Boogie. When I started making pictures and finding my feet as a street snapper, I would pore over his influential Artcoup website/blog, amazed at the access and intimacy he was achieving with his photography just a few blocks away from my Brooklyn base in the heart of Bushwick, photographing the lives of those ruined by crack and heroin addiction.



Long before Tumblr, Facebook and even the mass popularization of blogging, there was Boogie, posting pictures everyday, logging, categorizing, sharing his stream of consciousness with the world.

I wrote to him in 2005 to share my appreciation for what he was doing. "You should join Magnum" I said to him, "or get a big agency to represent your stuff" I suggested. "Yeah, I'm kinda in a fuck everybody kind of place right now" the reply came back "Thanks for your email though". Five years and five published books later and Boogie is still pushing himself and his style to the max, steadily maturing and adding new dimensions to his approach and his work.



Photo District News has a piece on the work from his latest show on their Photo of the Day post today where Boogie talks about this process:

“When the Carmichael Gallery contacted me about doing a show, they were at first surprised by my initial selection … it didn’t include any of the images that people are used to seeing from me, like gangs, drugs and other hardcore stuff. It was a selection of totally new work mostly of normal day-to-day life, and much of it in color. After years and years of shooting only b&w film, I started seeing images in color some time last year, and it opened up a whole new world for me. After going back and forth with the gallery, we came up with a final selection which we called The Uncovering. It’s a pretty apocalyptic series, but I think it really represents the new me.”