A magazine sent out a recent request for images of a specific town in Italy. I haven’t been to Italy since I went to my old journalism school friends Matt and Callie’s wedding in 2003. So this stock search was a great chance to root through my old film, reminisce and then get completely manic about scanning a bunch of the film.

Aside from the obvious nostalgic charm of reliving a great trip from your early 20′s, these images have opened my eyes to a few facts:

• In 2003, working as a freelance newspaper photographer, young Ryan really thought he was Henri Cartier-Bresson (though I think young Ryan had some decent chops)
• Older Ryan needs to travel more for fun
• And that there’s nothing quite as luxurious as a Leica M3 paired with a 50mm and Tri-X film. I need to dig that thing out of storage.

I hope you enjoy looking through a few of these old images.

Last Friday, the wife and I joined our good friends Michael and Aaron for a production of Martin McDonagh‘s, black comedy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. I’ll leave the reviewing to Aaron, but I was going through the archive today, with plans to get a good portion of my film archive scanned, and stumbled across the image above. It was created during a trip to Inisheer, a near neighbor to Inishmore in the Aran Islands. I thought it might be a good time to revive the “From the Archive” feature on the ol’ blog. Please check out more images from Ireland in my archive and in the slideshow below.

It was fun and I want to thanks photo editor Zoey Sless-Kitain and Monsieur McCormick for the chance to make the images and the great play in the magazine. Also, big shout out to all the portrait subjects for their patience and willingness to share and to play along, from being hoisted onto forklifts and splashing beer around behind the bar. Thanks.

Check out some outtakes at my archive or via the slideshow below:

Philadelphia Beer Scene – Images by Ryan Donnell

The March issue of Philadelphia Magazine marks the end of a small epoch for me. Since November of 2005, I’ve been given the honor of making the opening photograph of the calendar section in Philadelphia Magazine. I haven’t made every single one of these images during that time period, but I did complete a lot of them. To give you an idea, I’ve cobbled together 32 images of images that ran as the Pulse opener from my archive, which represents 32 issues of the magazine. This doesn’t mean the section is leaving the magazine, just that I won’t be shooting as many of the images for that section, if at all.

The assignments took on different formats through the 4 years that I did it. When I first began making the images, we were approaching the assignments from a journalistic approach, trying to find newsworthy events for the upcoming month’s issue that we could photograph in a candid, documentary approach.

What made the assignment particularly challenging at that time was making a singular photograph that communicated the story, but also fit the VERY specific format of the page, e.g., the format had to be slightly more vertical than square and with a lot of negative space in the composition to run type in two very specific places. Suffice it to say, I would often find a composition and just sit (sometimes for hours) waiting for that story-telling moment to take place within my little viewfinder. If I missed it, well, I didn’t miss it. It was a challenge and a lot of fun.

Eventually, the magazine decided to start running portraits of newsworthy Philadelphians in the Pulse spot. It offered me a chance to meet some fascinating people in and around Philadelphia. It also afforded me a chance to test my lighting chops. We, my assistants and I, almost always took our little studio on-location to where the subjects lived. The challenge was to create a fairly consistent portrait on the road. The set-up was almost never the same.

As I looked through the images, particularly the older images, I was struck by how many things I had experienced and people that I had met along the way: South Philly men dressed as Brazilian Mardi Gras dancers, Sixers dancers, Rocky in the Italian Market, homicides in the Southwest, rowing on the Schuykill, hanging out of the 56th floor of a skyscraper to photograph a crane operator, Eastern State’s gargoyles, Larry & Alicia, behind-the-scenes of a mall Santa, riding the Zamboni at the Flyers, flower show contestants, monkeys brushing their teeth, crawling around an abandoned roller-coaster from the ’60s, wudder ice, the Wildwood tram, high school rivalries, Comcast’s video wall, a congressional hopeful, an R&B legend, a surfing prodigy, an artists’ granddaughter, and so much more.

What other job in the world gives you access to that? Damn, I love this job sometimes.

Thanks to all the Philly Mag staff and alumni, the subjects and as always my assistants that helped make these images possible.

So, as a little homage to the good times that I had making those photos, I’ve put together a little video slideshow:

Ireland – Images by Ryan Donnell

The first email came from my buddy Chip Somodevilla, a great photographer with Getty Images in D.C. (Left: Chip galantly helped my friend Mark photograph my wedding last year. As you can see he’s used to covering much larger events.)

He sent a wonderful project he completed recently, covering his time with the campaigns during the 2008 Election. It was a great look at the power of individual images, combined as a larger project, to speak to a larger message. Images that might not have been as strong by themselves took on a whole new meaning when combined with another image. And Chip speaks really eloquently about the whole thing. Who woulda thunk it, Chip?

The second email came from my designer friend Nate. Nate is an afficianado of two things that I myself love: photography and dogs. While not a photographer himself, Nate has a great eye for it and especially project photography. Nate sends me random links to photography online and it’s always a treat when he does.

Today I got this link. I’d never heard of John Divola, but the project suddenly brought this rush of memories and links to other photographers and my own old work. (Below: Sweetwater, TX. 1999.)

It’s just funny to get two emails, back-to-back, that reminded me how powerful images can be in terms of conjuring memories and emotional response. Thanks for sharing guys.

-ryan