I am happy to announce the launch of my Etsy store, Eye Heart Photo. The store features some of my more decorative fine art travel, landscape, nature, and still life photographs from Europe, Bali, Morocco, and the United States. I will be adding more images in the coming days, and will be adding larger size print offerings as well. I hope you enjoy! http://www.etsy.com/shop/EyeHeartPhoto
I was thrilled to have my Christmas photography project “Season’s Greetings” featured on the New York Times Lens Blog this Christmas Eve. They featured a concise and well chosen edit of the series, as well as a brief write up about the project and my motivations. You can view the posting at http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/deconstructing-santa/. The full series can be viewed at www.brentclarkphotography.com/#/seasons-greetings
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Rolling billboards advertising door to door vagina saleswomen may not have been what America’s founding fathers or their wives had in mind when they ratified the first amendment. However, hookermobillboards is exactly what you’ll find cruising the Las Vegas strip day and night. Under the flimsy guise of “escort” service, Las Vegas prostitution and its associated sex trafficking have openly flourished using blanketed marketing techniques including these billboard trucks as well as aggressive packs of so called “porn slappers” handing out lurid escort service cards. Not surprisingly then, Las Vegas is one of the 17 most likely destinations for sex trafficking victims, with 1,496 domestic child sex traffic victims reported between 1994 and 2007, as well as estimated annual illegal prostitution revenues in the billions. Unbelievably, all of this is occurring in a city that has successfully marketed itself as family friendly vacation destination. To the dismay of Vegas old timers and moral conservatives alike, children of all ages now traipse between Vegas’ glorified shopping malls, all the while walking atop hundreds of littered erotic images advertising women for less than $100 on any major credit card.
Apart from the wax bulge in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s pants, the funniest thing at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Las Vegas was the chapel room with wax George Clooney waiting at the alter to “marry” anyone looking for a new Facebook photo. Oddly, a 40 something Elizabeth Taylor was the only other wax person in attendance at the weddings of bigamist Clooney and his never ending parade of brides.
Kayla and her adorable and uniquely named mutt, Triple Beam, were very successfully begging near the Louis Vuitton store on the Las Vegas strip. I struck up a conversation, and asked if I could take their picture. Within 15 minutes I learned that Kayla makes around a $100 a day begging, lives with her pot dealing boyfriend with whom she operates a makeshift convenience store out of their apartment, and has doubts about President Obama’s citizenship while possessing a deep faith in Jesus Christ. After returning home, I Google “Triple Beam” and discover it’s the scale you weigh chemicals with in high school science class, then never use again unless you happen to become a lab tech or your friendly neighborhood drug trafficker. I’m sorry to say that Kayla did not strike me as a science enthusiast.
View more of my photos from Las Vegas in the Where the Sinners are Winners gallery on my website. I will also be posting more new photos from my recent trip to Las Vegas on this blog in the coming weeks.
