Q&A - John Lavin

In case anybody was wondering…

  • Soundtrack of your life: Dawes, Emmylou Harris, Indigo Girls & kd lang (lately)

  • Coffee order: no order, just a Keurig cup of black with a few ice cubes every morning

  • Cocktail order: tequila soda, no lime

  • We’ll never catch you without: my over analyzing mind doing somersaults 

  • Guilty pleasure: Drag Race and its many spinoffs

  • Style icons: Montgomery Clift, Little Richard

  • Favorite designer: whoever makes colorful Hawaiian shirts, I guess

  • You’ll never get sick of: fried catfish

  • Your current state of mind: keeping calm and carrying on

  • Favorite place to travel: NYC

  • Where you’d most like to live: Big Island, Hawaii or mountain in TN

  • On your nightstand: monstera plant in a vase and stack of books I mean to read

  • Your greatest extravagance: a room with a view; I like to see out

  • Most treasured possession: whatever new handmade art I’ve gotten from mom or nieces/nephews

  • Talent you’d most like to have: the discipline to sit down and write for long periods

  • Most overused word or phrase: oh my god

Recent headshots

Not fully set up yet here in Miami, but am starting to test the new lighting situation. Lots of great natural light to play with here. A few visiting friends were kind enough to let me shoot them.

Steve Grand music video, 5 years in the making

Five years ago, Steve Grand asked Trevor LaPaglia and myself to shoot a music video with him in Palm Springs a couple of weeks before Christmas. We quickly made a video for Steve’s cover of All I Want for Christmas is You and it’s now got 2.5 million views on YouTube. So, Steve reached out to the two of us about a week ago and asked if we’d like to collaborate on a follow up or sequel to that video with his cover of I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I’m in Miami, Steve is in Chicago and Trevor is in LA, but we made it happen (with the assistance of talented local DP’s to shoot). I combined new footage with some of the old footage, to tell a bittersweet story of longing, of ex’s who miss each other, especially during this season of this weird year.

Miami portraits

Serving all kinds of Miami Vice femme fatal vibes, here’s Alice recently in Miami

Rocky Mountain high!

Third national park of the summer (Tetons, Yellowstone, now Rocky Mountain NP)

Portraits

A quick sunset sesh in the French Quarter and Bywater

Music video stills

How about a drag second line at the End of the World? In New Orleans it's traditional to throw a funeral parade (or “second line”) to honor the deceased. In this case, it was for the untimely demise of a San Francisco bar called The Stud. A bunch of queens with ties to the venerable SF institution got together and paraded to the End of the World, a riverbank along the Mississippi River in the Bywater neighborhood.