JOE WIGDAHL PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

I just got back from a month in Australia. Every year I make it a point to leave Chicago for at least 3 weeks or so during the winter. The Chicago winters are cold, harsh and blue and by the time February rolls around everyone in the city is so depressed they act like they just got out of a cousin’s funeral. So I leave. Last year I went to Australia and I loved it. It’s summer there so I get to run a lot and spend lots of time in the ocean and I hang out with lovely Australians and read a half dozen books. I’m never going to spend another February in Chicago. I took a lot of pictures and it’s going to take me a while to go through all of them, but here are a few to get you started.

Nothing but driving. I had the best beef jerky I’d ever had in New Mexico- it was as thin as paper and covered in dried chillies. For 3 days it seems like I ate nothing but that green chili jerky and looked at mountains and desert. By the time I made it to L.A. I had covered 3000 miles in 4 or 5 days and felt like I was starting to hallucinate so I met up with some old friends there and slept for a few days. 

The portrait that I took of Margot and The Nuclear So & So’s for Spin Magazine just came out. Here’s the shot.

After the shoot the band took us to their local scottish tavern- the Lockerbie Pub and we enjoyed some interesting cuisine- I lived in Northern Ireland for a little while a few years back and I guess I never realized that the pub food of northern Britain and the pub food of Indianapolis is essentially the same kind of fried, goopy, starchiness that is best washed down with a strong ale. On the way back to Chicago my assistant Jeremy and I got stuck in a snow storm- a car had driven off the road and we stopped to to see if the people inside were okay and they were fine.

I think Margot and The Nuclear So & So’s are in my neighborhood in Chicago right now recording their new record.

I had some time off so I decided to go on a long road trip- I had to be in Sacramento at some point for a couple days, and my friend Mike was going to fly into San Francisco to join up with me, but that was pretty much all I had for plans. I brought a bunch of camera gear, some groceries and a ton of podcasts.

Just as I was entering into Missouri I happened to catch a “This American Life” about family members being murdered. It creeped me out and set the tone for Missouri for me. I came across a high school football game- it was the last game of a losing season and they were beat by a ton so everyone was bummed. After the game I drove on through, trying to make as much headway on the first night as I could. At some point I passed out at a small motel, had breakfast at a Waffle House and high-tailed it to Amarillo. On the way I stopped at a gas station in a part of Oklahoma that had guys in boots and huge cowboy hats and there was a needle deposit in the bathroom- the cashier said that too many people are shooting speed and he was sick of worrying about getting stuck while taking out the trash. I’ve read Larry Clark’s books and it wasn’t really any surprise that there’s speed in Oklahoma- I just didn’t know ranchers and cowboys were into it. Maybe it’s their long hours.

Every hotel room I stayed in had so much Febreeze in it that my eyes were watering and it was choking at times. I suppose after about 30 of those news specials where the journalist goes in with a blacklight and some cotton swabs and proves that hotel rooms are a sanitary horrorshow, the hotel industry has given up on trying to actually clean the room and instead just gas it with a chemical approximation of mountain freshness. Between that and the free cable I woke up with a lot of headaches but they would clear out after the second or third hour of a driving and where I was looked totally different than where I started out that day.

In Amarillo, at the motel I stopped at, the desk clerk and I talked about her son and his motorcycle accident for about a half an hour. He’s got blood clots in his leg because of all of the pins in the bones and she’s worried about him standing up too fast from the couch and a blood clot going straight to his brain and killing him. So she calls him every hour or so to make sure he doesn’t need to get up and get anything. She’s been doing it for months. She was a sweetheart.

The next day I would head to New Mexico.

I directed, shot and edited a music video last year ( it’s sort of old news I guess) and I never really said anything about it on my website so I thought I’d put it here. It was my first effort in working with motion and I liked it- complications aside- so I’ve been getting more into it. This is the video for Owen’s “One of These Days” on Polyvinyl Records- hope you like it.

One of my best friends, Neal, got married a little while back. He and the lucky lady held the ceremony in a cornfield in central Illinois. Neal attended in traditional formal Scottish evening wear. He even had a dagger in his sock. He is not of Scottish descent. Nobody seemed to mind.
Towards the end of the night I misplaced my camera and ended up eating a bucket of hotwings and sleeping on someone’s floor.

In November I went on a road trip and drove 7500 miles around the southwest and up through California. I picked up my friend Mike Renaud in San Francisco, we ate some raw oysters down at the wharf and then drove back through the high Sierras, the Nevada desert and the Rockies. We spent a night at his girlfriend’s parent’s house in Denver (without girlfriend), getting a free meal and beating all of her little brother’s scores in Guitar Hero before the home stretch back to Chicago. I’ll be regularly posting pics from that trip and will have some of the images compiled in a gallery on my portfolio site, so be sure to check back often.

I was asked by Spin Magazine a week or so ago to go down to Indianapolis to take some portraits of the band Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s. The last time I went to Indianapolis was a year ago for a shoot for Rides Magazine of a custom car shop there called Killer Customz and it was a pretty strange experience.

My friend Jeremy and I went down to meet up with the band and as we were rolling up to their neighborhood we noticed that it was sort of a rough spot and there were a few burned down houses in the area. When we asked the band if they were blown-up meth labs or if there was an arsonist in the area or something Jason said, “No, people get in to feuds around here about a dog crapping on the lawn or something and then they just light your house on fire.”

Nice.

The band was super-super cool. They were game for any ideas and they took us out for fish and chips at the Lockerbie Pub afterwards. We drove back to Chicago in a snowstorm.

The pic is an outtake from the shoot. Spin decided to use an image that is way different so you’ll have to get the issue or check back later to see how that turned out…

Here are some other pics of the band’s house.

I was asked by Chicago Social Magazine to shoot a bunch of portraits for a series called “Chicago Nightlife.” The Cool Kids were my favorite shot. While we were setting up we mainly talked about mopeds and our favorite breakfast cereals and action figures. They love breakfast cereal. Booberry, yo.

Create Magazine interviewed me a while back for a feature article on studios around the midwest and I was picked for Chicago. The article, called “Shoot + Score,” focuses on how studios across the midwest are adapting to and using new technologies for commercial shoots.

I shoot mostly digital 35mm and 4×5 film nowadays by the way…